


Six of Swords

by anawitch



Category: Persona 5
Genre: (in later chapters), 5 Years Post-Persona 5: Royal, Akechi Goro Lives, Amnesia, But he's getting better, Complicated Parent/Child Relationship, Dealing With Trauma, Denial of Feelings, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Feelings Realization, Getting to Know Each Other, M/M, Mystery, Persona 4 Spoilers, Persona 5 Protagonist is from Inaba, Pining, Reconciliation, Sexual Content, Slow Burn, akechi is still a bitch, everyone is bad at feelings, it's mostly soft sometimes sad, learning to be normal people
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:22:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 36,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25758787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anawitch/pseuds/anawitch
Summary: Five years had dragged him further away from being a Phantom Thief, and the transition hadn’t been easy.Ren agrees to help investigate Akechi's missing memories when he reappears five years after the Phantom Thieves' disbandment. Their search for the Velvet Room leads him back to Inaba, where he must confront both his difficult relationship with his hometown and his rapidly developing feelings for his former rival. Adulthood is hard.
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist
Comments: 112
Kudos: 309





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren follows a lead on his long lost friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is dedicated to everyone who's ever felt like they'll never get the excitement of their teenage years back, and also to every gay who's ever really not wanted to pine over a friend with a dumb gay heart that won't listen. 
> 
> Basically it's really self indulgent. I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Chapter content warning: mentions of trauma

Five years had dragged him further away from being a Phantom Thief, and the transition hadn’t been easy.

Saving the world had left Ren with nothing but lockpicking skills, the memories of a now defunct superpower, and what Tae had once gently described as probable acute trauma. That big promise to put an end to rotten adults had been a well-intentioned placation that had proved to be woefully impossible, and it was infuriating to watch the news each day to see another too-wealthy man getting away with his crimes while the only people who could actually do anything about it sat comfortable in their complicity. Maddening to know that he and his friends had the capacity to create change without the means. What had once been long evenings spent planning societal reform were now monthly meetings to catch up on whatever crumbs of excitement they could draw out of young adult life that never came close to the exhilaration of defeating a palace ruler and knowing that they’d made a difference in the world. And he loved those meetings, loved his friends, lived for them, but he couldn’t help but miss all the things they’d once been. What they’d had.

Which was probably why he spent so much of his time chasing ghosts.

He was at Jazz Jin again. For someone with no interest in the music, he found himself there too often. There was an appeal to its underground vibe, the dimmed lights and its cluttered crampedness, something pleasing about the worn vintage records that lined the walls. He could never stomach more than one of their famous cocktails, yet he never ordered anything else. Forever sentimental, he supposed. It must have looked quite strange to the other patrons, but Ren had long since learned not to care about the opinions of strangers. It was habit. It wasn’t just about an ancient guilt over the one person he couldn’t save while he still had the chance, though that certainly came into play more than he was comfortable with. It was just… a quiet place, not physically but mentally. Somewhere he could sit and think. Or not think.

Not thinking had quickly become his preference.

He’d nursed the same sickly cocktail for almost an hour, and if that frustrated the owner, he never showed it. The ice had watered it down to a sugary lemon cordial. He was thinking about that, thinking about the edible glitter that spun in distracting patterns around his straw and not about the disappointment that ate away at his stomach, because their latest lead was always going to have been a coincidence - if Akechi was alive he clearly wanted nothing to do with Ren or any of the Phantom Thieves, and that was fine. They’d meant something to each other in the end, or so he’d thought, but it was fine. It was fine that there was one thing that happened five whole years ago that slithered its way into every dream that he just couldn’t fix. Honestly.

“Are you finally finished staring into that glass, or should I wait?”

And

Akechi looked down at him from behind the bar like no time had passed at all, one brow cocked in familiar condescension. Ren opened his mouth and promptly closed it. His brain was lagging. Clever words choked and died on his tongue.

It was supposed to be a coincidence.

“Since I appear to have rendered you speechless, I’ll spare you the trouble of asking which drink you’d like to examine next. I seem to recall you always deferred to my judgement in these matters anyway.” He took a bottle from the wall without waiting for Ren’s confirmation, paused and examined its label with pointed care. “I wonder – was joining me here part of your strategy to test my true nature? Were you waiting to catch me slipping poison into your cup?”

Ren watched the cocktail shaker rattle between his hands as he spoke. Watched him fill a tall glass that was half crushed ice. Watched him wait and watch him in return in an increasingly impatient silence.

“Poison isn’t the neat, traceless death most people presume,” he continued. “Arsenic and cyanide might be tasteless, but any detective worth their salt would instantly identify their signature violent vomiting and seizures.” God, why was he talking so much about poison? Akechi looked at him and shook his head as if his mere presence was already exhausting him. “Cleaning up your corpse on my first week here would be problematic. Your drink is safe, Amamiya.”

Oh. Slowly he raised the drink to his lips and sipped through the straw. He swallowed. He wasn’t sure what flavour the fruit syrup was supposed to be beneath the strength of the spirit Akechi had used, sharp and metallic like paint thinner. He put the glass down and looked back to Akechi, who was still waiting for… anything, he supposed. Definitely something more than the dead eyed stare he was being subjected to.

When he finally found his voice, all that came out was, “Hello to you too.”

“Yes, well. Hello,” Akechi replied.

Another customer who had somehow waded through the waves of awkwardness their encounter was surely radiating gestured for Akechi’s attention, giving Ren another blessed minute to think of something better to say. Akechi wore that practiced smile - his TV smile - and had the public cognition changed so much that nobody recognised the former celebrity working behind the bar? He looked exactly the same, barely any older, light brown hair perhaps an inch or two too long slipping stubbornly from behind his ears. He gave a pleasant chuckle as the customer fumbled with her change that slid from his face the moment she turned her back.

“You could have called.”

Akechi shrugged, indifferent. “I knew you’d be able to find me if you wanted to.”

If he wanted to. Like he hadn’t bothered looking. Like he hadn’t spent five years of nights drifting back to the decision he’d been forced to make to leave a friend, or rival, or _whatever_ dead while the rest of them got to carry on, to live and change and grow. Ren let his eyes flutter closed and bit it back. There was no point in arguing about it until he had the full picture - there would be plenty of time for that later.

“Well, as you can clearly see, I’m working. We can talk more after my shift.”

Much later, apparently.

Honestly, it would have been very funny and equally fair of him to just stand up and leave, disrupt whatever dramatic plan Akechi had rehearsed for that night, but… he didn’t. The shock of seeing him stood there, alive and well, seemed to have frozen him to his spot. So, he slumped over in the stiff stool he’d already been sat in for an hour and returned to stirring his new drink until that ice melted too, as if there was nothing wrong with the scene before him. It wouldn’t process. He stared and stared at him, but it was like watching a moving picture. A ghost retracing his steps.

Goosebumps had broken out all over his skin when Futaba had first brought the new hire at Jazz Jin to his attention - Shinji Nakanomatsu, a name any of the Phantom Thieves would recognise immediately. Was that really the best way Akechi could think of getting his attention? Had he always been so dramatic? Ren hadn’t changed his phone number since high school and wasn’t exactly a difficult person to find. Knowing Akechi like he did, he was probably testing the waters, feeling out whether that bridge had been burned. As if that were necessary when he’d long since shot out the foundations without losing Ren’s support. 

Eventually the dim lights brightened, and the customers dispersed. It was strange to see the Jazz Jin with such startling clarity, as unnatural as the man in front of him cleaning off his hands in the sink. Akechi finally turned to look at him, eyeing him up and down – taking stock of how he’d aged? Probably not. Ren was a little less scrawny and wore his glasses far less (despite actually needing them to see now), but other than that he was pretty sure he looked the same as the day Akechi disappeared.

“Did you miss me?” Ren deadpanned, breaking the silence.

Akechi scoffed in disbelief. “I see you haven’t grown out of your ‘sense of humour’.”

Finally, Ren grinned – and it might have been wishful thinking, but he was pretty sure Akechi’s expression softened too. Just a little bit.

“You know we looked for you,” Ren said.

“I imagined you would. You never knew how to let something go, did you?”

“You’re not just ‘something’.” Akechi stared blankly back at him. “You should have let me know you were alive.”

With a deliberate sigh Akechi wrung a towel between his hands. “That would have been difficult. I only… woke up recently.”

Ren stared at him until he sighed yet again. There were all of these quirks that had faded in his memory. He had almost forgotten how much of a show he had to make out of everything he did. He had definitely forgotten how much he’d missed it.

“I have no memory of anything after we defeated that absolute fool Maruki. I simply came to my senses in Nagatacho, strolling down the street without a clue of how I got there.”

“That’s… strange.”

Akechi gave him a withering look. “I’m aware of that.”

“You don’t know where you’ve been for five years?”

“If I knew, I would have told you already.”

“Do you want me to help you investigate your disappearance?”

“No,” Akechi said a little too sharply. “I am simply informing you of what happened. We were… almost friends, once. I suppose I thought you ought to know your decision did not kill me in the end.”

“We were friends.”

“If you say so.”

“I’ll help you investigate.”

“I really do not need your help-“

“I want to. I’m curious.”

Akechi looked at him for a long time, arms folded neatly over his chest. Then, he shrugged one shoulder and turned away, returning glasses to their places as Ren watched his back. Thoughts were finally seeping back into his suddenly exhausted brain, and that meant he was feeling a little more emotion than he was comfortable with, a surprising swell in his throat he had to swallow down before he made things even weirder. Things were already so weird. Because seeing him again, hearing the honed inflections of his voice, made him ache with just how much he’d missed having him around.

“Don’t you have some place better to be?” Akechi asked. The club had emptied; that night’s performer had long since packed away. “Meet me at the Diet building tomorrow morning. Nine?”

“I have class until twelve.”

“Twelve thirty, then. Don’t keep me waiting.”

On the long walk to the station Ren took out his phone. The group had been organising their monthly meet up without him and seemed to have settled on the same restaurant they always did. His thumb hovered over the screen, dancing over letters as he decided how to best summarise his evening.

 **[Ren]:  
**Sounds good.  
Akechi’s alive, by the way.

 **[Ryuji]:  
**Dude what, again?

\--

A familiar sight sat waiting for him outside the lecture hall, cross-legged on the floor, eyes glued firmly to her heavily customised Switch. Futaba bit down onto her lip in the intense concentration he had come to expect from her.

“Futaba?”

“Hold, please.” The buttons cried out beneath her smashing fingers. Class had let out a little early, but he was still going to be late if he hung around for too long – not that that meant anything to Futaba. Just like Akechi, she hadn’t changed a bit. After a moment, she punched her hand into the air with unabashed glee.

“Thank you for joining me,” she said with mock formality, placing the console in her lap as she patted the floor beside him as if it were an office chair. “We have much to discuss. Like how totally right I was about the fake name, right? _Right?_ ”

She leaned her head towards him; he ruffled her hair on instinct, eliciting a pleased hum from her lips. “Right,” he agreed. Futaba had been helping him look for Akechi since… well, since the day he disappeared, though there was little even she could do past sending out feelers to all his old haunts. Checking Jazz Jin’s staff register when she had had been a stroke of genius – that and incredible luck. He felt better about the whole thing after a good night’s sleep, a little less shell-shocked and a little more lucid, and he would be lying if he said he hadn’t woken up excited, even, to be solving another mystery with his old rival - juggling university work, a handful of part-time jobs, and an investigation, just like old times. That thought filled a gaping hole the absence of the Metaverse had left behind. He couldn’t recall a single word from his lectures that morning.

It was probably fine.

“Sooo… I’m glad you don’t have to feel responsible for Akechi’s death any more, and I know you and him sneaking around by yourselves is a whole thing, but as the voice of reason in this party-“ Ren raised a doubtful eyebrow, “- I just wanted to _remind_ you that this whole thing is super suspicious, and your rival-friend-whatever did try to kill you once, so maybe you should, oh, I don’t know, at least maybe reconsider walking down any dark alleyways with him?”

“I’ll turn on my phone location.”

Those magic words made Futaba beam. She took out her phone and ushered him to his feet, pushed him back so she could get him into the frame, circled him like the world’s tiniest wolf. “Wearing the same blue jeans he’s had since he was eighteen and a dark red t-shirt with a curry stain on the back.” Ren fished behind himself as if he’d be able to feel it. “Last seen on the 12th of July at precisely… 12:03pm.”

“I have to go,” Ren announced, waving her off but doing nothing to disguise his smile.

With one stern nod she turned on her heel and walked into the lecture theatre, but not before calling one last, “Stay safe!” over her shoulder. The next class were filling in.

He was five minutes late.

Familiar white columns stood tall and imposing behind a similarly towering gate behind a bustling crowd of workers in the middle of a lunch rush. Ren hadn’t been anywhere near the National Diet Building since they had defeated Shido. He tried to put himself in his seventeen-year-old self’s shoes – how had he felt seeing it then? Nervous. Excited. Angry. Angry most of all, at Shido and the world and Akechi for falling for their tricks. Anger felt good then, motivating and purposeful. Without his persona it was meaningless, unactionable. Awful things still happened behind that gate, and the only difference now was that he couldn’t do anything to fix it.

He scrunched his nose, shook the thoughts from his head. Akechi’s problems were his focus for the day, and he was far more suited to helping others than himself.

Eventually he spotted him. He was stood looking delightfully irritable with his arms crossed in a short-sleeved shirt and trousers, still apparently incapable of dressing his age. The sight of it filled him with nostalgia and improved his mood significantly.

“Class ran over,” Ren lied when he caught sight of him, rubbing the back of his neck. “Sorry.”

He hummed in response. It was a familiar, disdainful little sound that made Ren smile somehow.

Akechi narrowed his eyes. “Is something funny?”

 _Yes,_ he thought. _The fact that you still act like I piss you off so much is_ very _funny._

He shrugged and said, “Just happy to see you.”

“Then you’re easily pleased,” Akechi replied dismissively. He began to walk. Ren followed. “If you’re serious about wanting to do this, we should start with where I woke up. It isn’t far from here.”

“You said you woke up walking?”

“Mm. As if I had lost my train of thought, only instead of a thought it was four years of my life.”

“Five,” Ren corrected.

“Four,” Akechi repeated. Ren frowned. “You can wipe that look off your face. I never said you were my first point of call.”

Ouch. That stung. It really took him a year to realise that Ren deserved to know? Again, he found himself biting back the inflammatory comment that threatened to spill from his mouth. Arguing with Akechi just didn’t seem worth it right now when he could so easily change his mind and disappear again – which should have been fine really, now that Ren knew he wasn’t responsible for his death, but inexplicably wasn’t.

Akechi continued to speak, unphased by Ren’s deepening scowl.

“Idiotic as I was, I was still aware of the precariousness of my situation with Shido.” The way he spat out the name broke his pleasant, conversational tone, but he inhaled sharply through his nose and continued as if he hadn’t needed the moment to breathe. “I lived modestly throughout my high school career and moved half of my pay checks into a secret account in case matters ever complicated. Lucky for me, that account was neither discovered by him nor locked by the bank. I had enough to support myself while I investigated alone. Which was when I discovered something curious - very few people seem to recognise me. I searched for myself online and my fansites are still accessible, however all activity – even criticisms – quickly dwindled after Christmas in 2017. I presume that is something to do with public cognition.”

“That happened to the Phantom Thieves too,” Ren said. “People sometimes remember if you say the name, but otherwise…”

“I thought as much. I get the occasional odd look and confused strangers who ask if I worked here or there or if we went to school together, but nobody seems to be hunting down the big bad hitman behind the mental shutdowns.”

Akechi smiled at that, a smile that cracked his face in a way that was uncomfortable to look at. Realising that none of his adoring fans had even questioned his disappearance must have been difficult. He thought he should say something, but there was nothing that wouldn’t drive home just how alone Akechi was in the world. He looked down at his feet instead.

“Well, back to the topic at hand,” he continued breezily. “This is the place.”

Ren stopped to look around. A tall concrete office block loomed to the left of them, a wide busy road to the right. There was nothing significant about the location past its proximity to the Diet. He tried to imagine Akechi blinking himself awake there mid-stride, lost and confused and surrounded by noise and strangers. The real Akechi cocked an eyebrow at him. It was so difficult to consolidate the sad truths of Akechi’s life with the person that stood before him.

“I managed to convince a police officer that my wallet had been stolen to gain access to the office’s CCTV footage. All that revealed is that I, thankfully, did not appear out of thin air here, and that I seem to have walked from the direction of Kensei Memorial Park.”

“This could have been the last place you were seen in 2017,” Ren pointed out.

“Correct,” Akechi agreed. “I’m glad we’re on the same page.”

He carried on walking. Ren caught up to walk by his side, brushing their shoulders together as he moved out the path of another pedestrian. Akechi glanced at him from the corner of his eye, and the silence that followed was not… uncomfortable, but present and heavy, like small talk was now beyond them. Well, Ren wasn’t much of a conversationalist anyway, but Akechi usually had something vague and threatening to say to him in times like this. It felt like he was holding something back. 

When they reached the park Akechi seated himself on a bench and looked up at Ren as if waiting for him to do the same. He did. The midday sun bore down on his head. He wished they could have met somewhere else.

“Contact Lavenza,” Akechi ordered suddenly.

Yeah. It probably was something to do with her and her master. But… “Sorry. I don’t know how.”

“And here I thought you were their favourite wildcard.”

Ren resisted rolling his eyes. That pointlessly jealous pettiness certainly hadn’t gone anyway. “They always contact me first.”

Akechi nodded slowly, gaze wandering to the browning grass ahead of them.

“I already asked Morgana about it after you disappeared. In case there was any chance you were there.”

“You really did look for me.”

The hint of surprise in his voice was infuriating, but instead of trying to explain once again that he really did care about Akechi’s wellbeing against all reason, Ren said, “We still have a deal.”

And Akechi laughed at that - quite genuinely, as far as Ren could tell. It diffused some of that lingering tension, and that allowed Ren to relax into the bench, to spread himself out in a vain attempt to cool off. All it did was put more of him in direct sunlight. The heat didn’t seem to bother Akechi at all, of course; he was leant back into the wood, legs crossed, eyes trained on the nails of his left hand, his smile slowly fading.

“We can get to our long-awaited rematch once I’ve confirmed whether or not I’m truly, unconditionally alive,” he said after some consideration. “I had a suspicion that you’d be unable to lead me to the Velvet Room, but I’ve been exploring other possibilities to get what I want.”

Well, that sounded terrible. Ren tilted his head curiously, trying to keep the concern from his expression.

“I don’t believe we were the only persona users in Japan,” he said. “In fact, there are around a dozen cases from the past thirty years that I believe might have some connection to our own.”

Morgana had told Ren something like that, but he’d never been as privy to all the details as a Velvet Room attendant, and Lavenza and Igor had only briefly touched on the room’s other ‘guests’. He straightened up, attention successfully pulled away from the heat.

“Kyoto, Mikage-cho, Sumaru, Sendai, Tatsumi Port Island…” he listed them off on his fingers. Akechi loved having knowledge that Ren didn’t - Ren could see as much in his smug expression. “The most recent and most promising case for us, however, is a little closer to home for you.”

It took a second for him to get the implication.

“Inaba is your hometown, is it not?”

He wasn’t about to ask Akechi _how_ he knew that, because Ren was pretty sure he’d never told him exactly where he was born – it was far easier to say he was from Okina, a name people would occasionally recognise. It shouldn’t have surprised him that Akechi would rather spy on him than ask him something outright.

He nodded.

“Then you’ll recall the strange occurrences that coincided with three murders in 2010.”

“Not really,” he said. He had only been ten, after all. “I remember them finding the bodies and arresting the officer behind it all.”

Huh. Was that where all his hatred for authority had come from? That was definitely something to analyse later.

Akechi looked somewhat disappointed. “Then allow me to remind you. A previously unrepentant murderer suddenly confessed to his crimes despite a lack of evidence to convict him - a change of heart, one might say. That, combined with a mysterious fog that some suggested were connected to a series of otherwise unexplained illnesses.”

Oh, right - he did remember that, but he’d forgotten that those things had occurred so closely together. He recalled his mother forcing him to wear a mask to school after a girl a few years below him was apparently hospitalised because of it. He had never considered those incidents to be related, but he quickly understood why it caught Akechi’s interest.

“Do you recall anything about a ‘Midnight Channel’?”

Slowly, Ren shook his head. Now Akechi was obviously disappointed in the direction his questioning was taking, arms folding across his chest.

“There was a rumour circulating _your_ town -” he emphasised the _your_ like Ren was being difficult on purpose, because god forbid he have trouble remembering something that happened while he was still in elementary school, “- that staring into your television at midnight on a rainy night would reveal the person who was supposedly your soulmate.”

“And?”

“ _And_. My hypothesis is that all of the above plus strange local rumours go hand-in-hand with persona users. In our case, the rumour was the Phantom Thieves themselves, if you recall. It seems to me that many of our modern urban legends have roots that stretch all the way back to the Velvet Room.”

And it was a shame, because Akechi really was a genius detective. Even without seeing the files he no doubt kept wherever it was that he was living now he knew with certainty that he was on the right track. “You’re good at this,” Ren said, when what he meant was _it sucks that you had to be a hitman instead._

“I’m aware,” Akechi preened. “It turned out to be more troublesome investigating in Inaba than I expected, however. That ‘charming’ little place fulfilled every small-town cliché. Very few were willing to talk about the murder spree to a stranger.”

The image of Inaba’s elderly inhabitants slamming their doors in Akechi’s face was almost too delightful.

“I’m sure you’re beginning to understand why I’m telling you this.”

Ren nodded. “My parents want me back after exams finish next week. They won’t mind you coming too.”

“Perfect.” Akechi stood up abruptly and wiped invisible creases from his shirt. “Then I’ll see you at Jazz Jin next week.”

Ren stood up too, sweaty and sluggish. Annoyed, again, but he was starting to remember that that was just his general state of being around Akechi, because he was the most frustrating person on the planet. _Sure. You just walked back into my life knowing full well how much choosing to let you die traumatised me, but we can wait a week and probably continue to not talk about how messed up this all is then, too. That’s fine._

Instead he said, “Do you want to get dinner on Friday?”

Akechi’s face crinkled, though whether it was in confusion or distaste, Ren couldn’t really tell. “Why?”

“We’re meeting up before our exams.”

“Then no,” Akechi said. At Ren’s expression he sighed. “I have no interest in your friends, and they have even less interest in befriending me.”

“They don’t hate you.”

“I killed Wakaba and Okumura. I promise you they do.”

Ren gave a shrug, relenting. Fine. He’d tried. His friends were the most amazing people and more forgiving than they should have been considering the cards that had been dealt to them, but maybe it was childish of him to think he could force Akechi back into their lives. He wasn’t even sure why he wanted to. Nostalgia for a time where he hadn’t known he was planning to betray them? What did that even mean? The real Akechi – the difficult asshole in front of him - had never really hung out with his friends anyway.

They walked to the train station together, idly commenting on things they passed along the way that had changed since Akechi had last been alive like there was nothing strange about it, advertisements for new phones and television shows he hadn’t bothered to catch up on in the first year of his resurrection. At the ticket gate they re-exchanged phone numbers, and then they parted ways.

His train was disgustingly warm and smelled nauseatingly of sweat and heated metal. No matter where he sat the sun inconvenienced him, but he chose to suffer the heat on his neck over than the sunlight in his eyes. That’s why he saw Akechi watching him expressionlessly from behind the gate, turning swiftly the moment he was caught. And that felt familiar. With all the strangeness of the past 24 hours, it only just occurred to him that something in Akechi’s story wasn’t adding up. He could still see him distantly, vanishing up the stairs, and… there was a reason why Ren had never given up on him.

March 2018. What he’d seen through the window. Even now, he was so certain.

If Akechi was lying to him again he’d kill him back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren decides to confront Akechi about the concerns that have been plaguing him, all in the name of friendship. Definitely just friendship.

“Man, I miss high school. I swear I’d do a thousand more of Ushimaru’s classes if it meant I didn’t have to take these stupid finals.”

Mouth stuffed full of rice, Ann said, “Yeah, you’d totally take that back before you finished one lesson.”

“Nu-uh,” Ryuji insisted. “For real, I’m so screwed.”

“I look forward to seeing how you handle your fourth year,” Makoto spoke from across the table.

“There’s no way I’m gonna make it that far!”

“You must forgive my disbelief, but I do believe you have said those exact words for every examination since 2017.”

Ryuji’s face crumbled into a dramatic pout as he turned to Yusuke and whined, “I really mean it this time.”

“He’s probably right,” came a muffled voice from Ren’s bag.

“You’re not supposed to agree with me!”

Haru snickered behind her hand.

Nothing had changed since high school – at least, not between the Phantom Thieves. Their bickering was the most comforting sound Ren had ever heard. He’d record it to fall to sleep to at night if there was some way to do that that wouldn’t be extremely weird.

After the week he’d had he’d needed a little normalcy.

He’d texted Akechi on the train. He’d considered waiting until he saw him in person, but honestly, he had about as much a chance of figuring out his reaction through text as he did through his expression anyway, and the curiosity was burning. After everything that happened leading up to defeating Maruki he was pretty sure he could trust him. He wanted to trust him. But just because he wanted him to be honest with him didn’t make that the case. The chances of him lying about _something_ were always fifty-fifty, so, he put his trust in the happier fifty and told him.

 **[Ren]:  
**Just remembered.  
I saw you in March 2018.  
You were at the station when I was leaving Tokyo.

And two hours later, Akechi replied.

 **[Akechi]:  
**Interesting.

So, there was that.

There was also the small issue of having to introduce Akechi to his parents in a week’s time. While he hadn’t lied about them being fine with guests, he had emitted some of the more complicated details of his home life, including that he and his parents didn’t like each other very much. Or, maybe that was oversimplifying it. He loved his parents and they loved him - it was just everything that Ren decided to do with the life they’d given him that caused problems, and he’d been a good boy and kept his head down for at least the past year, but still - Akechi was in for a long, tense week.

Oh, and his finals were two days away. That was… fine.

“How ‘bout you, Renren?” Ryuji asked.

Ren guessed they were still on the same topic. “I studied.”

He was right. “You ain’t freaking out at all?”

Ren shook his head. “I always pass.”

“Cocky son of a…”

He caught the sweeping hand looking to mess up his already untamed curls and laughed, threw his elbow into Ryuji’s ribs to put a swift end to his continued efforts. Ryuji gave a dramatic cough as he flopped over the table and knocked half-full glass to the floor in the process; Makoto threw her hands in the air to avoid the spray. With all her usual grace and poise Haru succeeded in preventing them from being banned from the restaurant for life, though they quickly split the bill and left in a fit of giggles that drew the attention of everyone they passed.

They were all so damn stupid. He loved them so fucking much.

When it was just him, Ryuji, and a sleeping Morgana tucked into his bag left on the train, Ryuji finally stopped laughing and looked at him for a long time.

“You doing okay with the whole Akechi thing?” he asked. Ren blinked. Ryuji shrugged. “I’m just asking. I know it kinda messed you up before.”

Ren rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s fine,” he said. Then, after a moment: “I asked him to come tonight. He said no.”

“Yeah well, that’s ‘cause he only gives a shit about you, man.”

He gave a non-committal hum to that. It certainly didn’t feel that way, but he knew on some level Ryuji was right. Akechi had always only had time for him. That time may have been spent festering with hatred as he gathered intel on all of Ren’s weaknesses, but it was certainly more than what he’d done with any of the others. He didn’t know why Akechi voluntarily distancing himself from his friends bothered him so much.

“I don’t want things to end up how they did before.”

“That ain’t on you,” Ryuji replied, not unkindly. “I know, I know - you can’t help yourself, you see a kicked puppy and you gotta help it, you know we love you for it.”

Ren snorted.

“I know you know what you’re doing here and everything, and I’m glad he’s got you around to help him out - but if things get weird or tough or whatever, you better call me. I’m no good at advice, but after everything you’ve done for me you _know_ I’m gonna sit and listen.”

Ren looked Ryuji dead in the eye. “If you keep saying things like that, I’ll fall in love with you.”

“Dude, stop,” Ryuji laughed, punched his shoulder lightly. “I’m being serious!”

“Thanks,” Ren said. Seriously. 

“Yeah, you got it.”

Things weren’t easy after they defeated Maruki, not for any of them. That was something he reminded himself often when the guilt over his decision overwhelmed him. _I’m not the one who had to lose a parent twice. I never had to have a second chance to fulfil my dreams torn from under me._ One day, not long before he left for Inaba, Makoto and Morgana ambushed him, sat him down sternly and told him in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t fooling anyone pretending that he wasn’t hurting, told him nobody blamed him and that just for once they and the rest of his friends would like to help him back. Makoto brought up the age-old trolley problem – do nothing and kill five people, or change the train’s direction to kill just one. Tragedy was certain either way. Apparently, scholars had debated the most ethically correct course of action for almost fifty years without ever coming to an agreement. Ren had said, well, one of his choices was to do nothing and let everyone live, so clearly it wasn’t the same thing.

 _“I disagree,_ ” Makoto replied. _“One of your choices was to do nothing and let us fester in an unstable world where nobody had the option to change and grow for the better. The other was to let four people who were already dead and mourned for return to their graves. There was no good choice. You should never have been forced to make that choice. But all of us would have chosen the same thing - we_ did _choose the same thing. You made an impossible decision and you are suffering for it just as much as we are.”_

Morgana homed in on the problem all of them knew he really had more directly. _“Ren… Akechi wanted this.”_

It took a long time to come to terms with that. So, he understood why his friends were showing so much concern now that Akechi was alive again - and they were right to, because there was a very real, very loud voice in his head that said if this turned out to be some cosmic joke he’d have to go through it all over again. All the pain. All the sleepless nights. He wanted this second chance to help Akechi, to have the relationship they might have had if not for the meddling of Gods, but after all the grief and confusion he’d worked through, he didn’t really know how to… act around him anymore. He couldn’t remember what had been normal between them, and that had weighed on him for the rest of the week.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe that what was making him feel so weird - he was overthinking things, and that wasn’t like him at all. Maybe he just needed to relax and stop worrying about what he said to him. If he wanted to be friends with Akechi, he had to treat him like a friend. And that meant that they were going to have to talk about it.

“You going somewhere else?” Ryuji asked when Ren didn’t join him in standing at their stop.

“Yeah. Catch you later.”

Ryuji shrugged.

Ren waved at him through the train’s window and nudged Morgana awake.

“Want to go to Jazz Jin?”

Morgana yawned and arched his back in a stretch. “Fine. But I want drinks!”

\---

“I can’t believe Muhen lets him drink here,” Akechi grumbled.

“He lets me because I’m so cute,” Morgana preened, though his pride in that was somewhat diminished by how long it took him to fish the straw into his mouth with his greedy little paws. Akechi glared at him so hard Ren was a vein would pop in his forehead.

“You’ll get wrinkles,” Ren warned.

“Quiet,” Akechi snapped. “Why are you even here?”

 _Because I want us to be friends._ “Payback for all the times you bothered me at Leblanc.”

“Karma, then. I suppose I deserve as much.”

“I’ll have the strawberry sunrise, too.”

Akechi’s drink mixing skills had already improved, he noted as he took a long sip from the glass he all but slammed in front of him, as sickly sweet as the regular bar tenders always made them. He was a quick study. Too clever to be standing behind a bar. Holding his head in the palm of his hand he made idle conversation with Morgana while Akechi served the other customers, sneaking glances at him every now and again to feel out his mood. Exasperated, he thought, but not unhappy to have Ren visit judging by the way he always came back to stand in front of him.

“How did you end up working here?” he asked.

“Muhen is one of the few people who remembers me, and he didn’t question why I hadn’t technically graduated from high school, nor why I wanted to be hired under an alias.”

Yeah, Muhen had always had a soft spot for Akechi - like a kind but unfortunately too distant uncle. Ren often wondered how different things would have been if Muhen had acted on those protective instincts. Akechi could have used an adult in his life.

“He also had an… apartment he was willing to rent to me for cheap.”

“Oh? Where?”

Akechi didn’t have to answer. He looked Ren in the eye like he dared him to laugh at the irony of his situation.

He didn’t laugh.

“Is it nice?”

Akechi scoffed. “Nicer than yours.”

“I liked my attic,” Ren shrugged.

Four pretty girls in expensive, tailored dresses crowded the bar in a mess of whispers and giggles that he quickly realised were meant for Akechi, whose quick-change smile was a talent that never ceased to impress him. He was a different man in front of anyone else, polite and bashful at the girls’ tipsy flirtations, one hand behind his neck in a gesture that felt strangely familiar to Ren. Should he have been offended that Akechi was mimicking him to brush off their attention? Because he was, a little, and he provided no help at all until Akechi’s gentle rejections and the undeniable call of Morgana’s cuteness drew them away again.

“It must be hard being attractive,” Ren said out loud. The kindness in his face had already melted back to disinterest, though that too quickly warped into something else, a thick knot between Akechi’s brows.

“I understand you’re being facetious, but the attention is irritating and no longer serves any purpose.” He scowled as he drew his hand across his cheek and brushed his hair behind his ear, not quite looking Ren in the eye. “Working in a club is much like working in television - all I do is _smile politely_ and bite my tongue. The pay is far worse, of course.”

“There’s a special service at the Maid Café where you can pay the servers to insult you. You’d be good at it.”

“I won’t ask why that’s something you’re familiar with,” Akechi said, though the idea seemed to amuse him enough to shake off his frustration. “Perhaps I would be. I believe you’re the only regular depraved enough to enjoy that, however.”

The brief twitch of a smirk that flashed over Akechi’s lips was as unexpected as the flip of Ren’s stomach.

Weird.

He decided it was better not to dwell on it.

Before he knew it, he’d stayed until closing time again, and it looked like all his student loan was being spent on taxis that summer, because the last train had departed over an hour ago. This time, to Akechi’s quiet but obvious confusion, Ren waited even longer until he finished closing up, hands in his pockets in the now-quiet streets, Morgana already drifting off again in the familiar comfort of his bag.

“Do you want something?” Akechi asked, exasperated, when Ren continued to linger once he’d locked the bar’s door.

“Can we talk?”

He sighed as if it were the most inconvenient thing he could imagine, but he didn’t stop Ren from following him into the dark alleyway ( _oops, sorry Futaba_ ) and up the stairs to his apartment.

Begrudgingly, he had to admit that it _was_ far nicer than his attic if only because it was actually built for someone to live in, though ironically it seemed far more bare and unlived in than his, plain off-white walls naked and sad. Akechi probably thought it was minimalistic. He turned on a small desk fan and sat in the middle of his sofa, looking up at Ren expectantly.

“I didn’t want to let you die.”

Akechi had the audacity to roll his eyes.

“Akechi,” Ren warned, tone scolding.

“You made that much perfectly clear at Leblanc. We argued over it back then. I’m the one who forced you to go through with it, if you recall.”

“I know that,” Ren said. Silence. How was it possible that this was _more_ awkward than he was expecting? The fan whirred its way around its path and back before he spoke again. “It was still a difficult decision to live with.”

Akechi drummed his fingers on the back of the sofa. Rolled his head from side to side. Sighed.

“You do remember that I shot you in the head? Or, would have, had you and your friends not meddled in my affairs?” he asked. Ren nodded. “I have no idea why it bothers you so much, but if you need me to say it so badly, fine: I appreciate that you made a ‘difficult’ decision, and I don’t regret that I asked you to do it. I stand by what I said – my life is my own, and I refuse to owe it to anyone. You respected that, and I… thank you for it.”

Ren nodded some more. He was nodding a lot, moving his head even when neither of them were speaking, like a nervous tick.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”

“Because I was trying to come to terms with losing more than four years of my life.”

“I could have helped you.”

“You would have wanted to. What _I_ wanted was time by myself to adjust to a new world.”

Okay. That made sense. It wasn’t like Akechi was well known for reaching out to friends. It sucked, but who was he to tell Akechi how to deal with something like that?

There was just one last question. Then he could stop torturing himself over it.

“Akechi. You really don’t remember being at the train station?”

“No,” he said with certainty. “The last thing I even vaguely remember is dropping the wall and your sentimental ramblings about our deal. Or flying in that infernal… _monacopter,_ depending on what we are considering ‘last’. Though I do commend you for finally doubting me - it’s good to see you exercising your common sense.”

Ren shoved his hands back into his pockets, ready to disappoint. “I trust you. It might be important to our investigation.”

“If you even saw me.”

“I did,” Ren said.

Akechi cocked an eyebrow. “Are you sure you didn’t simply see what you wanted to see?”

“I’m positive.”

Akechi hummed thoughtfully and levelled him with a steady gaze that only increased his nervousness. And it had to be nervousness, though there was no clear reason for it, that made him fidget and squirm where he stood. Anything else would be something he couldn't even begin to address right now.

“Is there something else?” Akechi asked, slow and somewhat tentative.

“No.” Then, “See you next week.”

“Good luck with your finals,” Akechi called lazily after him as he walked far too quickly down the echoing staircase and back into the hot, stagnant air of Kichijoji.

The streets were quieter so late at night, though he could still hear the muffled sounds of music and conversation from somewhere close by. _Don’t think about it._ When he was far enough away from Akechi’s he took out his phone and put in his location. _Don’t think about it._ He waited for a driver to be assigned to him. _Don’t think about it._ The driver confirmed. _Seriously, do not think about it._

At the sound of Morgana’s voice he almost jumped out his skin. “Feeling better?”

Ren said, “Fine. Great,” and climbed into the back of the taxi.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never know how to split up chapters tbh I get to about 3,000 words and I'm like yeah that's probably enough
> 
> Everyone knows that if you think about not thinking about something hard enough it'll eventually go away, good job Ren
> 
> Next up: Inaba!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren and Akechi make the journey to Ren's childhood home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: strained parent/child relationship

His exams came and went in a blur of late nights and finely crafted caffeine, and he felt about as confident as he ever did in them, which was to say he’d done his best, and that was usually enough. Honestly, they had been a blessing - he’d been so busy with last minute revision that he hadn’t had a moment to fret over his upcoming trip to Inaba. Even as he made his way to the train station, suitcase bouncing on the uneven floor behind him, he couldn’t find it in himself to worry. He was far too drained from the mental exertion to do anything more than put one foot in front of the other.

Akechi was waiting for him prepared with only a rucksack, though he wasn’t transporting a season’s worth of clothes like Ren was. He eyed the suitcase suspiciously and shrugged, placed his bag into the overhead locker and gestured for Ren to take the window seat. He did, too tired to argue that he’d much prefer the aisle.

“I imagine you must be eager to see your family?” Akechi said.

Whatever face Ren pulled drew a short breath of laughter from him. The trace of a smile remained on his lips a few seconds longer.

Oh, right. There it was. That thing he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about.

On the plus side, he always enjoyed the long train journey between Tokyo and Inaba. While the city was most certainly where Ren belonged, there was a nostalgia that came with watching the busy towns fade into greenery, seeing the rolling fields stretching out all around them. The countryside had been an excruciatingly boring place to grow up, but time and distance had taught him to appreciate the charm of its quiet seclusion. Despite taking the aisle seat Akechi leaned forward to watch the scenery change too, the sun setting pink and yellow over a long river that ran alongside the tracks and then vanished into soft round hills.

“It’s strange to think someone as angry as you could have come from somewhere so quaint,” Akechi commented casually.

It took Ren by surprise. People who knew him often commented on his strong sense of justice, but being called out for his anger made him feel seen in a way that made him almost uncomfortable. Maybe it was easier for someone like Akechi to recognise. After a moment, he gave a small shrug.

“Inaba has as many injustices as Tokyo. But it’s hard to disagree in a small community.” Ren frowned at the spray of delicate iris flowers that bloomed over the next stretch of land. “I guess it did make me angry.”

Akechi turned his focus to the seat in front of him. “I admire it, you know. It’s what interested me about you in the first place.”

“My anger?”

Akechi hummed affirmatively and, disappointingly, didn’t elaborate any further.

They swapped trains twice, and the quality of their seats dipping each time, from bright and modern to dull and ragged little carriages no-one cared enough about to change. The sky darkened to a deep purple and stark white lights switched on above them. The final train’s gentle motion conspired with his exhaustion to lull him to sleep, cheek pressed into the window’s still-warm glass. He dreamed of something, but he wasn’t sure what - he got a sense of something rich and luxurious and strangely… cold, but the details slipped further away with every insistent nudge of Akechi’s elbow.

“M’up,” he mumbled and slapped him away. He rubbed his face, combed his fingers through where the glass had flattened his hair. It was completely dark outside, and the train was pulling to a slow stop at the Yasoinaba Station. Akechi gave him a strange look.

“What?” Ren asked.

With a frankly bewildering amount of venom, he snapped, “You look ridiculous.”

Well, okay then.

Returning to Inaba from Tokyo would feel a lot like moving back in time if his surroundings didn’t scream their age so loudly. Yasoinaba Station seemed more and more decrepit with each visit. It was normally around there, right next to the ticket booth, that the nostalgia wore thin.

He didn’t hate his hometown. He had plenty of pleasant memories of riding his bike along the riverbanks with his friends, cosy summer festivals, visits to the old Shrine with his grandparents. But then he got into a fight at school, punched a boy who couldn’t keep his mouth shut and broke his nose in a fit of adolescent rage and hormones, and from then on he was nothing more than a nuisance whose parents had failed at teaching him manners, and it was kind of hard to come back from that when everyone knew everyone’s business the way they did in Inaba. Defending that woman from Shido had just been the final nail in his coffin.

News of his overturned case had forced them to treat him kinder when he returned, of course, but five years hadn’t quite been enough to move past that sting of rejection.

His parents waved them down from across the car park, and though he hadn’t truly thought Akechi would be his ‘true’ self in front of them, he couldn’t deny his relief at seeing their polite exchange of bows and pleasantries. He was making a better first impression than Ryuji, at least - a bleached blonde punk from Tokyo had gone down like a lead balloon. Akechi had a sweet look to him, though, a deceivingly delicate prettiness that made him endearing and unintimidating. If only his parents knew what exactly he’d used _that_ for.

They crammed themselves between their luggage in the cramped backseat, windows rolled down to make up for the broken air conditioning. He let the bizarreness of his situation wash over him; if anybody had told him two weeks ago that he’d be in his ten-year-old family car with Akechi, he would have laughed in their face.

“So, what is it that you do, Akechi?” his father asked.

“I just completed my final year of law school.” He lied like breathing, and Ren was so taken aback it took a moment for him to snap his mouth closed. Fortunately, his parents didn’t notice; Akechi had said the magic words.

“How wonderful!” his father cried. “Congratulations. Your parents must be very proud.”

“We hoped that Ren would follow a similar path,” his mother said, which was great, because they might as well get their disappointment with him out in the open first thing so that Akechi wasn’t surprised later. “But psychology is an interesting choice too.”

 _I was arrested, mom. My case being overturned doesn’t stop that from being the first thing people see on my record even if I wanted to apply to the stupid school._ He looked out the window and felt the tension headache creeping in.

He wasn’t even sure he’d told Akechi what he was studying, but he took it in his stride.

“I agree,” he said amicably. “While I am, of course, not as well read on the subject as your son, I must confess I find behaviourism a fascinating study. Understanding the inner-workings of the mind is key for many professions – I believe it was a clever career choice.”

Wow, he was laying it on thick, but he saw the pleased glance his parents shared in the rear-view mirror and knew that they were thoroughly taken by his charming act. It was better than them hating him, he supposed, but he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of annoyance - with all that had happened between them he’d forgotten how irritating Akechi could be in his full detective prince prime and how difficult it was for anyone else to see through the bullshit. His parents were going to ask about him and his law career every time he visited them until they died. Great!

They pulled up outside his house, and for the first time in a long time it was a mercy to be back in his childhood bedroom, where Akechi dropped his act so quickly it might have given him whiplash had he not grown so accustomed to it. Akechi paced the tiny space idly, examining the contents of his bookshelf with shameless curiosity. It was cluttered with video games and a few damaged anime figurines, books littered sparsely in between. A few sun-bleached movie posters remained on his walls. The rug on his hardwood floor had a dark stain from the first and last time he’d succeeded in sneaking food into his room. Akechi had probably never had a bedroom like this, not with so much history on display, so he ignored him and let him be nosy despite his building frustration with his tuts and quiet snickers.

“So, this is where the once-famous Joker grew up. Would you be offended if I said it’s exactly what I imagined?” Akechi asked.

“You know me so well,” came Ren’s dry response. That twitching smirk passed over his lips again. He wished he’d stop doing that; it was doing nothing to improve Ren’s sinking mood.

Akechi sat on his red-check bedsheets without invitation, leaving Ren to take his damaged desk chair.

“I notice you didn’t bring Morgana with you.”

“He doesn’t like my dad,” he said, and Akechi cocked an eyebrow. “He complains when Morgana sleeps on my bed or sits on the furniture. It’s boring for him here anyway.” He shrugged like the separation anxiety wasn’t already settling in, and Akechi chuckled lightly.

“I hope you didn’t mind me… _embellishing_ my story to them.” He did, a little bit, but he shrugged again anyway. “I thought it might be an easier week for both of us if they liked me. Will they talk to us about the murders?”

“Probably not,” he admitted.

“Hmm. Where would you recommend we start, then?”

Just as he’d suspected, Akechi did have a case file, a thick manilla folder filled with printed copies of local newspapers and photographs that he spread out over his bed. Old detective habits, he supposed. He wondered how many more like it he had back in his apartment.

“Of the three major happenings that drew me to this town, I believe the murders will be the easiest to investigate,” Akechi voiced aloud. “A former criminal such as yourself must know someone at the police station we can question about that.”

And he knew it wasn’t anything more than Akechi’s regular ribbing, but being back in his hometown had rendered him a little too sensitive to it. He tore at the frayed edges of his chair, bounced his knee and ignored him.

“Amamiya?”

“I don’t.” His words came out harshly, more cutting than he’d intended, and a brief flicker of surprise lit Akechi’s face.

“If something is bothering you, then say it,” he bit back. “I’m not interested in you moping around.”

In Akechi speak, that probably translated to something along the lines of _you seem to be upset, is everything okay?_ But honestly, Ren was tired, and he didn’t feel like interpreting.

“I’m tired. Get your stuff off my bed,” he ordered, toothlessly.

Akechi complied with a blatant indignation Morgana could only dream of achieving, but at least he didn’t press him any further. And Ren wasn’t really lying – he’d be better in the morning, and even better than that once their investigation took over. Coming home just made him homesick.

He unfolded the futon from his closet and lay out the covers for Akechi so that there was no floor left for them to walk over. His room was only a little bigger than the closet itself. And they left one at a time to change and prepare for bed, and neither of them said a word, and Ren couldn’t help but feel guilty for snapping even though he knew there was no need to. Akechi, of all people, couldn’t complain about a bad mood. Still. When they climbed into their respective beds and the only light came from the night sky beyond his open window, he turned on his side to look down at Akechi.

“Sorry.”

“For what?”

“For snapping at you.”

“I couldn’t care less, I assure you. You really don’t need to apologise to me,” he said, though the sharpness with which he spoke strongly suggested otherwise.

“I do.”

Akechi opened his mouth and closed it again, as assured of Ren’s stubbornness as Ren was of his. Still, it didn’t feel enough.

“I should have warned you about my parents. They can be pretty judgemental. We won’t be in the house enough for it to be awkward.”

He hadn’t returned to Inaba without a friend since he’d graduated high school for that reason alone; it was much easier to avoid his parents’ more careless comments on his life choices when they were busy being respectful hosts.

Akechi looked back up at him. “I wasn’t aware that your life here was so hostile.” 

“It’s not. They’re not. They aren’t bad parents.”

Not bad. Just… emotionally distant. The kind of parents who told him they loved him by pushing him to do better. The kind of parents who would do anything in their power to avoid an awkward conversation where they might be forced to admit blame. When the day came for him to have a permanent address somewhere far away from Inaba maybe he’d be able to talk to them about all the hurt they’d caused him six years ago, but until then, their relationship was as precarious as a tightrope walk.

“They never apologised for sending me away,” he spoke quietly. “It’s difficult to forgive them.”

Then Akechi smiled, and his smiles around Ren were so different to the ones he showed the rest of the world, always laced with a little cruelty even when they were well-intentioned. Of course he’d understand a grudge like that - Akechi had never let anything go in his life. And he wet his lips before he spoke, not as subtly as he seemed to think. Or maybe he wasn’t trying to be subtle at all.

_Don’t think about it._

He said, “They should beg for your forgiveness,” which probably meant something like _your resentment of the people who ostracised you after you protected a stranger and disrupted the status quo of your conservative little town are valid._

That tone of voice made him squirm with something he _shouldn’t think about_.

“I could make them, you know.” Akechi had that look about him, the one reserved for the Metaverse that verged dangerously on mania. “Once I have what I need, of course.”

Ren exhaled, and something was very wrong with him, because Akechi’s thinly veiled threats were far more endearing than any of the honeyed words he’d spoken back in the car. But they were ridiculous and unnecessary. It wasn’t something he should encourage.

“Please don’t threaten my parents.”

His smile sweetened. “I was joking, of course.”

Ren rolled back over, and despite his exhaustion, did not fall to sleep for a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another short one! Can you tell I whizzed through these chapters so we can get to the good bits lmao. Thanks to everyone who's left kudos, and huge thanks to everyone who's commented/subscribed! You make my day <3


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ren and Akechi make a slow start to their investigation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: suicide mention

If there was one good thing about visiting his parents, it was his mother’s cooking. Since moving out of Leblanc’s attic to become a full time student his diet had steadily snowballed towards whatever he could throw in the microwave at 10pm, and that was something his mother (nor Sojiro when he visited) would not tolerate. For that reason, it wasn’t a surprise to see the little bowls of white rice and vegetable soup still steaming on the counter when he and Akechi wandered downstairs early in the morning – for Ren, at least. Akechi, on the other hand, seemed momentarily taken aback, like he somehow hadn’t expected to be treated as a guest, but he masked it well and peppered his thanks liberally between each bite. And it was weird to eat breakfast with Akechi in his childhood home, weird to see him against a backdrop of his middle school photographs, very weird to hear him complimenting his mother’s food as if he hadn’t tried to kill her only son five years prior. But it didn’t exactly feel wrong, either.

When they were finally permitted to leave the table Akechi bowed low from the waist, and for once Ren thought it might have been sincere.

Inaba was roasting that morning; that didn’t bode well for the rest of the day. They walked in the shade of the surrounding houses for as long as they could, until they reached a stretch of land unshielded from the unforgiving sun. The Samegawa Flood Plain was bustling with activity already, gangs of kids on bikes getting the most out of the first days of their summer break.

“So, where to first?” Akechi asked.

“The police station. But I can’t promise results.”

“Well, with my charm and your… familiar face, I’m sure we’ll find something useful.”

Ren snorted. He couldn’t say he was looking forward to being in a room full of police officers (standing beside the detective who tried to kill him), but he _was_ a firm believer in getting the worst part out of the way first. Sometimes that was revising advanced developmental psychology, and sometimes that was talking to cops. Akechi was probably right, anyway - it was the obvious place to start.

So early in the morning the station was mostly empty, just a tired middle-aged woman whose aunt or grandfather or younger sister Ren probably knew sat behind the front desk. Though she seemed surprised to see anyone, she offered a polite smile.

“Good morning. How may I be of assistance to you today?”

“Good morning. It’s a strange request,” Ren began. Immediately her brow furrowed, because it was clearly too early for strange. He hurried on. “We want to know about the murders that took place here in 2010. Are there any officers willing to talk to us?”

“I’m writing a paper on the efficiency of rural police forces solving violent crimes,” Akechi spoke before she could respond, light and sugary. “When Amamiya informed me about what happened here, I knew I had to visit. To solve such a case in less than a year is a truly impressive feat.”

The woman blinked blearily, looked at her half-full mug of coffee and then over her shoulder to the offices behind.

“Amamiya? Tsuyoshi’s son?”

Everyone knew everyone in Inaba. He nodded. She directed them to take a seat, dialled a four-digit number into the phone on the desk and began a hushed conversation with whoever sat on the other end.

“I asked you to come with me to make use of your local connections,” Akechi leaned in close to murmur.

“I’m not name dropping my parents,” came Ren’s hushed reply.

“It’s not _name dropping_ , it’s reminding people that you live here so that they’ll talk to us.”

“It doesn’t have to be the first thing I say.”

“It wasn’t any of the things you said.”

Ren pressed a thumb and forefinger into his temples.

At least the reception had air conditioning.

A few minutes passed before the receptionist finished her conversation and summoned them back to the desk. “I’m afraid the chief is not interested in giving interviews,” she said, politely apologetic.

“It wouldn’t be an interview,” Akechi countered fast. “It would be entirely informal.”

“I’m sorry, but he was quite clear. The incidents were a difficult time for this department, given the perpetrator. If you’d like to read more about it, there are plenty of articles online.”

“My mother’s name is Tomoko Amamiya,” Ren said. A heavy silence followed. The receptionist looked at him as if he’d grown another head, and Akechi sighed so hard he felt his breath on his shoulder. Ren smiled, spitefully satisfied.

The moment they were out of sight of the station’s windows Akechi grabbed his jaw, pulled his face towards his own to force him to look into his eyes, fiery glare rivalling the heat that enveloped them again as soon as they were outside.

“Don’t be a pest,” he enunciated slowly. Ren pursed his lips in a desperate attempt to hold in his laugh, and Akechi narrowed his eyes, grip tightening just a fraction. Riling him up could be so _funny._ So funny that he forgot not to think about the improbable perfection of Akechi’s skin, the sharp lines of his jaw, how fast his own heart had suddenly begun to-

“Amamiya?”

Akechi released him like he’d been burned. Ren shook his head like it might clear it.

A small woman barely any older than them stood at the building’s corner, peering at them curiously, light brown hair spilling out from beneath her police uniform hat. Recognition flashed over her face the moment their eyes met, and she beamed widely.

“I knew it!” she exclaimed. “Wow, Amamiya! Look at you! You got so tall!”

It took him a few seconds, but he was eventually able to place her – an old neighbour who had once lived a few doors down from him. She was a few years older, but his parents had been friendly with hers, and he remembered a few evenings in her back garden chasing each other around with other kids not quite their age making the best out of being forced to socialise. Seeing her in a police uniform took him by surprise.

“Oh! Sorry. The name’s Chie Satonaka,” she introduced herself enthusiastically as Akechi looked between them.

“Goro Akechi,” he replied.

“Akechi, huh? Hm… that sounds familiar.”

Ren and Akechi shared a look, but Chie shrugged it off, deeming that remnant of memory unimportant. “Well, what’s up? Got something to report?”

“Actually…”

And they repeated their lie to her. Just like the receptionist, Chie reacted with initial surprise before her face scrunched into a reluctant grimace. Ren had only been ten when the murders disturbed his otherwise quiet town, so it wasn’t unlikely that some of the more gruesome details had been kept from him, but Chie must have been in high school; clearly her memory of the events was far better than his, judging by the way the colour drained from her cheeks.

“You really don’t remember it?” she asked. “I don’t know what I can tell you that wasn’t in the news…”

“Perhaps you could give us some insight into what it was like to experience such a shocking event as a teenager? For example, I would be interested to know which theories and rumours were spreading around your school at the time. Who did you think the criminal was, for example?”

Chie glanced from Akechi back at the station, her hand coming to rest over her mouth. A thought crossed Ren’s mind – that somebody touching their face was a key sign that they were lying to you – but he couldn’t think of any reason for her to hide the truth. Maybe she was just nervous.

“Yeah, okay,” she eventually said. “Obviously I’m not going to tell you anything confidential, and you can _not_ tell my boss, but I don’t mind talking about what I remember if you want to know so bad.”

“Thank you, Satonaka,” Ren said; she waved her hand dismissively.

“Don’t get too excited! It won’t be anything interesting. I’m totally swamped for today, but I can stop by your parent’s place after work tomorrow if you want?”

They thanked her again before she rushed inside, maybe to escape the heat, maybe because she’d noticed the growing frown capturing Akechi’s mouth and didn’t want to be questioned any further. He huffed and scraped his hair off his face and took a moment to glare at Ren, which was entirely unfair considering how much he’d just helped him. Ren grinned straight back at him - Ryuji might have called it ‘shit-eating’. Miraculously, the look on Akechi’s face faded to what he could have sworn was begrudging amusement. 

“We only have six days to find a persona user,” he said. “Let’s not waste any time. Where should we go next?”

\--

It was busier than he’d expected in the Central Shopping District, even for summer. A steady flow of teenagers laughed and joked as they flitted between stores that had never been open when Ren was their age, and that gave him a little hope for the town – that this generation wouldn’t suffer the same boredom that had bludgeoned him. Unfortunately, that crowd wasn’t exactly what they needed right now. What they needed was a little old dear with time on their hands to reminisce about the good old days, and they all seemed to have their hands full behind those same stores’ counters.

A tinkling bell announced their arrival to the owner of the general store, too small to fit much more than the two of them inside. Akechi busied himself browsing the limited selection on the shelves while Mrs. Imai regaled Ren with tales of his parents when they were his age that he didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d already shared; he just smiled and nodded and wished she’d considered investing in air conditioning at some point in the forty years she’d owned the place.

“… and it’s just lovely to see the place thriving with young people again after we spent so long without any real business, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Ren agreed. He hooked his finger under his collar in a subtle attempt to cool himself off. “Was it because of the fog?”

“The fog? Oh, no, no. Junes opened, do you remember? It took away so much of our business. No, the fog came later – don’t you remember?”

Ren furrowed his brow, clumsily steering the topic back where he wanted it. “I was telling my friend about the fog. I forget the details. It made a lot of people sick?”

“That it did,” Mrs. Imai said. “One girl ended up in hospital – goodness, what was her name again? Her father came here sometimes. Oh, it’ll come to me…”

“What did her father do?” Akechi butted in.

“I think he was… ah! Now I remember! Dojima. The little Dojima girl. That poor child. They say it was a miracle she survived, you know.”

He let her chatter on a little while longer and brought two blueberry popsicles before saying his goodbyes, handing one to Akechi as they stepped back into the furnace. It was reaching noon, now, and the heat was becoming unbearable. Even the children seemed to have disappeared, most likely ushered inside by concerned parents. The district was quiet as they walked together down the shaded sidewalk.

“We need to narrow our search,” Akechi announced suddenly, very business-like for a man holding a popsicle; he put it between his lips and stared at the pavement, deep in thought. “It’s clear the older generation are unwilling to discuss anything with us. We’ll need the names of everyone who went to high school here in 2010.”

Ren licked a bead of melting ice before it reached his hand and frowned. “How are we supposed to get that?”

“What do you mean, ‘how are we supposed to get that’? Is that not what you keep Sakura around for?”

They walked further out until the stores turned to streets turned to farmhouses sat in the middle of browning fields, and in the shadow of an old oak tree Ren slumped to the ground and took out his phone. He checked the signal - a bar would probably be enough. Akechi pulled a face at the dry dirt before dropping down to join him. He sent a short text – _I’m calling you_ – because Futaba hated to be surprised by phone calls, and not a second later received her response – _OK._

She answered on the first ring. “You’re calling? You never call. Is everything okay? Did Akechi try and kill you? Is he currently trying to kill you? Say yes for yes!”

“I can hear you, Sakura.”

“Oh. Hey Akechi! So, what’s going on?”

Ren explained; Futaba listened. He heard the clacking of keys on the other end as he fed her the address, the important dates, his old school email address, a number of things Ren couldn’t understand to be relevant, but he trusted Futaba to work her magic. When she stopped finishing her sentences and begun to tap away in earnest he turned his attention to Akechi and his popsicle, which, in retrospect, he should have foreseen would be a poor purchase. Sometimes he was so good at not thinking about it that he forgot to think about it just enough to keep himself out of situations where he’d have to _really_ think about it. Akechi ran his tongue neatly along what little remained of its edge. Ren looked pointedly up between the leaves and branches. He heard himself think _idiot,_ for some reason in Morgana’s voice. 

“Looks like they delete their sensitive data every five years,” Futaba said, bringing him back to reality. “Meh. It’s fine, I can handle it. Check your emails in an hour – I’ll give you the name of every student that ever passed through Yasogami High School’s doors!”

“Just from 2010, please.”

“Boooring.”

And in true Futaba fashion, she hung up without another word. 

Neither he nor Akechi moved. The sun’s scorching rays lit a treacherous path of sweaty discomfort, and a few more minutes in the shade wouldn’t hurt their admittedly few plans for the rest of the day. Ren lay on his back in the dry grass and closed his eyes.

Akechi said, “Your lips are blue.”

“So are yours,” Ren replied, without needing to look.

“What an idiotic choice of refreshment. We look like children.” 

“You didn’t have to eat it.”

He heard a rustle, a shifting breeze that felt as if Akechi had leaned back against the tree trunk, and his compliance came as a surprise; Ren had half expected him to force him up to continue their search, but apparently even Akechi’s heat tolerance had its limits. Even with the grass tickling his bare arms, the subtle acknowledgement that he had given himself to the bugs that lived between the blades, it was kind of nice lying there in the shade. It reminded him of being a kid, of happier memories chasing his friends around the fields before everything had gone to hell.

“Did you grow up in Tokyo?” he asked, because if he didn’t say something he was probably going to fall to sleep. 

It took a moment, and Ren thought he might just pretend he hadn’t said anything, but Akechi replied, “I did, mostly.”

Ren peeked up at him through one eye. He was indeed leaning against the tree, fingers busied uprooting the grass. Lips most definitely blue. It did look childish, and that tugged on his heartstrings somehow. Akechi didn’t look back, though.

“I was born in Tokyo. After I discovered my mother hanging in the bathroom, however, I was removed to live with an aunt in a town not unlike this one.”

That was something Akechi did a lot, he noticed. Rather than beat around the depressing truths of his life he’d spit them out shamelessly, completely unconcerned with Ren’s own comfort or the awkwardness his comments left in their wake. Sometimes it felt like a test - how much could Ren listen to before he couldn’t bear it anymore and showed him that pity he so despised? But the thing was, Ren wanted to know. He had this deep, pressing need to understand each part of Akechi he’d missed the first time around. He could endure the uncomfortable truths. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at him seriously to prove it.

Akechi’s eyes flitted towards him, examining his reaction closely before he spoke again.

“Everybody knew what my mother had been, and what she had done to escape the shame of it. I’d been enrolled in their school for less than a month before the bullying became enough of a concern that social services stepped in, and they decided I was better off somewhere I knew with a foster family back in Tokyo. Not an ideal childhood, but I think I would have died of boredom somewhere like here, so perhaps it was for the best.”

He tried to picture little Akechi running around with him, lips a sticky blue, sneaking shortcuts through the local farms and shoving each other into nettles like the little brats they most certainly had both been. It wasn’t difficult to imagine. There were so many points in Akechi’s life where he could have grown up to be a half-way normal person.

“Your turn,” Akechi said. Ren blinked up at him. “You always pry your way into my history. Now I want to know what exactly happened to make you hate this place so much.”

Ren frowned. Before him stretched nothing but grass broken up by an occasional tree rolling up onto small hills, and beyond that, a sad little forest where he’d been told never to go alone. The answer wasn’t the tedium of small-town life, though; his best childhood memories all seemed to be connected to that prevalent boredom, in fact, making the most out of the little entertainment they had with friends he’d had since birth. But they were friends who’d disappeared all at once after he’d been arrested. Akechi had shared enough with him - he supposed he owed him something in return, no matter how it paled in comparison.

“I already told you most of it. I was in trouble a lot at school. Nothing serious - talking back to teachers, a few fights, normal teenager things. Most of the time it was nothing to call home about. I had friends and I worked hard and got good grades, so it was fine even with the adults thinking I was a bad influence. Then Shido happened. My homeroom teacher stood up in court and told them I’d broken a boy’s nose in class – it was a fight over something stupid, and it was a lucky hit - and then all those little things became big comments about me and my character. And they should have stood up for me and said that I wasn’t dangerous, that I was just a teenager, but they didn’t. Not my teachers, not my parents, and when I moved to Tokyo, none of my old friends wanted anything to do with me.”

He joined Akechi in pulling up grass, added some to the growing pile between them.

“It was the same when I came back. Everyone was too embarrassed to apologise. People only talked to me when they had to, mostly acting like nothing had changed. In their defence, I never made the effort to fit in again either. I don’t hate Inaba, but moving to Tokyo taught me that the people I grew up with weren’t my friends, they were just… people I grew up with. Any time I’m here I’m just waiting to go home again.”

Whether he understood or not, Akechi gave no commentary. He just nodded. That was fine. It wasn’t a hard thing to talk about. It wasn’t even a particularly interesting thing to talk about. Honestly, his shit was nothing compared to basically everyone else he’d ever met. But Akechi hadn’t been part of those Phantom Thief meetings where they’d sat down and shared that sort of thing, and he should have been. Maybe hearing why they’d banded together the way that they had would have changed something. But… that didn’t matter now. Akechi was alive again. They were sat underneath a tree in a field in Ren’s hometown, casually talking about their childhood traumas like normal people - like friends.

“Why are you smiling?” Akechi asked.

He was? He was. Ren wiped his mouth with the back of his hand like he could mute it, settling back on the ground. He said, “I never thought we’d talk about things like this again,” and when Akechi threatened to roll his eyes he decided to push a little further. “I’m glad you’re alive.” 

“You’re an idiot.”

“I mean it.”

Akechi just stared for a while, still bewilderingly bewildered by him, but Ren didn’t miss that behind his hand, he was smiling too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's summer without a mildly suggestive popsicle?
> 
> I have a new job! I'm going to try and edit as much of this as possible before I start in September but updates might slow down a little bit. Just as a heads up! Thank you so much for all the kudos and comments, you're all lovely <3


	5. Chapter 5

Futaba forwarded the names they needed on time just as she’d promised, but Ren didn’t notice that until they finally returned to the house three hours later. They hadn’t talked about much else serious in the field, just lounged around and made idle conversation about Inaba and Tokyo and, eventually, how thirsty they both were, which brought an end to their time in their quiet little spot. In Ren’s room they sat together on the bed and sifted through the three hundred or so names alphabetised in the email until the sun set at seven and his parents called them down for dinner.

The conversation felt more stilted than when they’d sat together that morning, and Ren wondered if Akechi had taken what he’d said about his parents before to heart. He stayed polite, of course – painfully so – but he offered far less, and that left his mother to carry the conversation.

“So, how long have you two been friends for?” she asked.

Akechi didn’t answer; he looked to Ren, letting him determine how best to weave that lie.

“A couple of years,” he decided, because his parents would question why they’d never heard of him if he said they’d met in high school, and that would complicate things. “We were in the same fishing society at university.”

A glance told him that Akechi very much regretted giving him power over his imagined life, but he stayed civil and nodded, putting food in his mouth to stay quiet. _Payback for lying about law school._

“Do you plan to stay in Tokyo now that you’ve graduated?” she pried further.

Akechi swallowed. “I do,” he said. “Though I suppose I could be tempted by somewhere like Inaba. I rather enjoy the peace and quiet. It almost feels as if nothing bad could ever happen here.”

“We do have a wonderful community,” his dad agreed. “We look after each other.”

Ironic, considering the biggest topic of their conversation that day. He made eye contact with Akechi, and they hadn’t made any plan for it, but Ren saw the opportunity in front of him. “There was a serial killer here a while ago.” And Akechi perked up with performative surprise.

Predictably, both his parents tensed in discomfort, and his mother said, “Ren, that isn’t appropriate conversation for the dinner table.”

“Oh, no, it doesn’t bother me. I studied criminal law, after all,” Akechi attempted, but then his mother fell quiet, and the remainder of their dinner was spent in an awkward silence - which was exactly how he’d expected questioning them would go down, but at least Akechi couldn’t say he hadn’t tried.

Back in the bedroom Akechi hunched over his laptop, reading out names and striking them through one by one.

“Yosuke Hanamura?”

Ren typed the name into the search bar and shook his head. “Looks like he’s in Tokyo.”

There was no need to bother Futaba with something like this when he had mutual friends with almost everyone in Inaba - it wasn’t exactly difficult to figure out who was still around simply by trawling through their social media accounts. Many of them had moved away to bigger and better things, and he gave a silent cheer to each of them.

“Hmm… Saki Konishi. She was the second victim,” Akechi commented idly as he struck out her name. “She had a brother, Naoki Konishi. Would it be insensitive to question him?”

“Yep,” Ren answered, though he still entered his name out of curiosity. “He moved away anyway.”

“Rise Kujikawa? Now why does that sound familiar…”

“Risette.”

Akechi swivelled around in his chair. “ _Risette_ went to your school?”

Ren shrugged. “Before I did. I forgot about that. Are you a fan?”

He didn’t dignify that with an answer; he huffed, turned back. “Well, I suppose she would be a particularly difficult person to get a hold of. I’ll go ahead and cross her out.”

It took them a little under two hours to make it through the list. When they were done Ren rested his chin on Akechi’s shoulder without giving it much thought, like he’d do with any of his friends, and peered down at the laptop screen. All in all, there were almost fifty former students they could find online that still lived in Inaba, and about twenty who had updated their places of work and made themselves wonderfully easy to bump into.

“We can do half of them tomorrow,” he said. He noticed Akechi had gone very still and quiet but couldn’t quite figure out why. “Some are too far away. We’ll have to get the bus.”

Akechi nodded stiffly, and Ren stood up straight and eyed him curiously. The tips of his ears were a vibrant shade of red.

“Ah. You have sunburn,” Ren said, unable to resist the temptation to poke.

“Leave it,” he grumbled as he slapped Ren’s hand away.

\--

Much of the following day was spent moving back and forth between Inaba’s commercial areas in an attempt to catch perplexed almost-thirty-year olds on a break from work to barrage them with questions. They’d discussed it and landed on a new lie to ease the information gathering process: Ren was writing a paper on the psychology of superstition. Amazingly, it proved to be effective.

“Oh yeah, I remember that,” said Kenta Matsuo, a first year in 2010 who now sold tickets at Yasoinaba Station. He was smoking out in the carpark when they found him. “You were supposed to wait until it was raining at midnight, turn off all the lights, and look at the blank screen, and then you’d see the person you were supposed to fall in love with. Man, everyone was talking about that for ages.”

“Did you know anyone who reported it working?” Akechi asked, apparently incapable of letting Ren do the talking.

Matsuo shrugged. “I mean, we were kids, so everyone said it worked. I never did it. I had this friend who said he saw the second year he had a crush on. Even then we all thought that was probably wishful thinking though.”

“Were there any further details about what he saw? Was it a clear image?”

“Uh… wow, it was a long time ago. You know I think he said it was like a silhouette, but then he started saying he definitely knew who it was, so we all knew he was lying.”

That was corroborated by the other six people they managed to find that day: it had to be a rainy night, at midnight, you had to be alone, and then you would see somebody’s silhouette – your soulmate. The most interesting thing they’d discovered was that one girl remembered a fight in her class where two boys claimed to have seen the same person, which seemed to imply that it really was all just the wishful thinking of lovesick teenagers. She put a name to the mysterious figure they’d seen, though: Yukiko Amagi, whose family ran the famous inn. Unfortunately, that was one of the places on the other side of Inaba, and it was late enough that the buses would likely stop running before they could get any useful information.

Akechi’s mood had soured considerably in the absence of progress. He kept a sullen pace with Ren on the walk back, quiet and contemplative, a knot between his brows. Nothing suggested that the Midnight Channel had anything to do with neither the murders nor the persona users. None of his theories were connecting in the ways he’d hypothesised.

“It’s only day two.” They had three and a half days left in Inaba, and even after that, there was nothing to stop them from returning later and investigating further, and even after _that_ there were the other places Akechi had earmarked to investigate. Besides – and he’d never say it out loud – but if they figured out the mystery so soon he would be disappointed, because the thought of spending his free time chasing down persona users across the country with Akechi was surprisingly compelling.

He let himself have that one selfish thought. And it was selfish – Akechi had lost his memories, so of course it was important to him that they figured it out sooner rather than later, and beyond that, he’d already been searching for a year without him. It probably wasn’t as fun for him as it was for Ren.

Dark clouds gathered overhead.

“The rumour theory is unsubstantiated,” Akechi murmured, more to himself than anything.

“I don’t think so,” Ren said. “They saw what they wanted to see on the Midnight Channel – that’s what cognitive pscience is all about.”

“ _Seeing what you want to see_ is an everyday occurrence. It’s not confined to the supernatural,” Akechi countered.

“I think you were right. It’s too much at once to be a coincidence.”

“You two look serious,” came a voice close enough to tell Ren he hadn’t been paying enough attention to his surroundings. Chie gave a cheerful wave. “I was just heading to your place! Did you still want to talk?”

Given his parents reaction to murder talk, they decided to take their conversation to the floodplain, empty now as the sun set gold and orange behind the darkening clouds. The cicadas were loud in the long grass, and the air was cooler than it had been, but not by much, still sticky and humid and heavily present around them. They took a seat on the stony staircase.

“Looks like it’s gonna rain,” Chie said. “I guess we should make this quick, huh?”

“How did you find out about the murders?” Akechi replied, straight to the point.

“Actually, I walked straight past the crime scene, so I knew about it before it even hit the news. That was Mayumi Yamano – the TV reporter – but we didn’t find that out until later. Nothing like that had ever happened here before, so it was kind of a big deal. You don’t remember it at all, Amamiya?”

“Not much,” Ren answered.

“You weren’t even in high school yet, were you? I guess that makes sense.” Ren somehow resisted pointing out that sound logic to Akechi. “Anyway, everyone was spooked, but also kind of excited. It’s hard to explain. She was found on a TV antenna, so it felt… serial killer-y, like some kind of warning. You wanted to know how everyone reacted, right?”

“That, and what everybody thought had happened. Theories, rumours…” Akechi said.

“Right. Well, uh… I don’t know if you remember this part, but every time it rained back then there was this weird fog – some people thought it was like a bad omen or something. It was the same when they found her. I don’t think anyone really thought she’d been killed by some mysterious… fog monster or whatever, but it was definitely something people talked about.”

“Is that the same fog that was rumoured to be making people sick?”

Chie tilted her head, casting an inquisitive look at Akechi. “Uh, I guess,” she said, then frowned and added, “You sure know a lot about this.”

“I found it to be an interesting case.” Akechi smiled a placating smile that Chie reluctantly accepted.

“Right.” She kicked her feet through the gravel that marked the path to the river, taking a moment to find her place. “So… after that, Saki Konishi was killed. She was in the year above me at school, and my friend was really close to her, so it came as more of a shock, you know? The fog was around then, too, but that was the last murder for a few months - the fog still appeared, obviously, but nobody died. Then the third victim, Mr. Morooka, was our homeroom teacher. That one was completely unexpected. We were freaking out because it was so different to the other murders-”

“How was it different?”

“Oh, well,” Chie wavered. “I mean, he was a guy, and the other two victims were girls. And he was found on a water tower.”

“Is a water tower so different to a telephone wire or a TV antenna?”

“Well, yeah – it was a totally different signature.”

“Was that a common opinion amongst your peers at the time?”

“I don’t know about everyone…”

Akechi was brutal. Ren already knew that, but poor Chie didn’t, and she squirmed beneath his unrelenting questioning until Ren took pity on her and shot Akechi a _look_ that made him blink and sweeten his smile. Maybe it was just because he knew him better now, but that smile felt as cold and sharp as ice. 

“Ah. Sorry if I seem overeager,” he laughed sheepishly, mimicking Ren’s nervous tics like he had at Jazz Jin. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “The police force at the time treated the murders as the work of one criminal, but you noticed the inconsistencies as a teenager. You really were meant to be a police officer, Satonaka.”

A quiet, nervous laugh escaped from Chie, too. “It’s fine. Thanks.”

Their discussion came to a swift end after that. Akechi had pushed a little too hard, and Chie verged on rattled. When the first drops of rain rippled over the river she made her excuses and left, glancing back over her shoulder as if she were about to speak again before changing her mind and speeding down the path.

“She knows something,” Akechi said, watching her go.

Ren had to agree. Nothing she said had been particularly suspicious, but she’d been acting strangely from the moment they asked her to talk to them. It wasn’t the same as the rest of Inaba’s residents, not a reluctance to share the town’s dirty history, but what felt like a conscious desire to leave something out. There was an energy to her – a prickle of hairs standing tall on his arm despite the heat. Mentioning the possibility of him having a wildcard sixth sense that Akechi didn’t might have gotten him killed for real, though, so he kept that part to himself.

“We should spend more time collecting statements before accosting her about persona and the Velvet Room. I want her to be completely unable to deny anything.”

“Why would she deny anything?”

“She certainly hasn’t been in the sharing mood so far.”

Rain fell heavier, it’s steady tap against the stones as comforting as a crackling fire – unfortunately still as warm as one, too. Even so, it provided enough of a relief from another long day in the sun that neither of them made a move to get under shelter.

Akechi gave a satisfied little hum and closed his eyes lightly. A new lead had improved his mood already, and Ren gave himself permission to look, just for a second. Just to look. He didn’t have to think about anything. Just… oh, Akechi looked as sleek and otherworldly as an oil painting under a sheet of rain. That was an interesting observation. No need to analyse it any further.

Only the first rumbles of thunder on the horizon moved them to their feet, and flashes of lightning branched over the distant mountains to light their path back. He’d forgotten how dark night could be out in the country, so it was a good thing his feet remembered the way, because without his glasses he couldn’t see shit.

That night they ate reheated curry that couldn’t hold a candle to Sojiro’s alone at the table before retiring to his room to try and hook up his old PlayStation 3 – and somehow failed, despite being a former master phantom thief and genius detective, because the cable kept disconnecting even though there was absolutely no reason for it to. Akechi apparently found Ren’s frustration so funny that his initial cruel laughter accidentally tapered into something more real, something hoarse and honest. Eventually, once Ren gave up, he busied himself reading through Ren’s well-worn manga collection, and Ren lay on his bed and caught up on what he’d been missing in the group chat, and the rain pelted against the window heavy and comforting. And he thought to himself, oh, it worked - we really are friends now. And then he blanked out the rest.

He sent a message to his friends.

**[Ren]** :  
No persona user news yet.  
We might have a lead though.

**[Ann]:  
**Yay! It would be SO cool to find some.

**[Haru]:  
**I agree! I’d love to exchange experiences.

**[Ann]:  
**Are you having fun at your parents’ place? We miss you!

He glanced down at Akechi flicking through the pages of his book, lying on his front on the futon.

**[Ren]:  
**It’s not too bad.

He let his thumb hover over the letters. Part of him that wanted to let them know that Akechi was behaving like a normal person for once – that he _was_ a normal person underneath all the rage and murder. They’d probably be quite genuinely happy to hear it, because they were the best people in the world and only ever wanted Akechi to get better, even with what he’d done to them. It was kind of weird to just tell them out of nowhere, though.

Akechi put the book down and left the room without a word.

He deleted his half-typed message and tried again.

**[Ren]:  
**Does Morgana know I love him?

**[Futaba]:  
**He says, “You better!”

He snickered, stretched his arms above his head and cracked his back, and that movement reflected in his beaten-up television screen and made him pause. It was stupid, or… maybe it would be stupider not to try - in the name of their investigation, of course. It wasn’t quite midnight, but really, who knew if that part was even necessary? It was just a rumour anyway. It wouldn’t hurt to look.

A yellow glow still crept beneath the gaps in his door when he switched off the lights, enough that he could see a shadow of himself stood strangely in the middle of his bedroom like an idiot. The rainfall was softening, now a gentle patter and… he thought he saw a flicker of something. He kept his eyes on the screen and squinted as he reached blindly for his glasses on his desk, but then the door swung open and he found himself staring straight into Akechi’s silhouette behind him.

And his chest squeezed tight enough to suffocate the butterflies.

“What _are_ you doing?”

He turned around slowly, put his hands in his pockets and shrugged casually to hide the fact that he was sure his heart was beating hard enough to see it through his shirt. Akechi turned the lights back on and looked at him with bemused amusement.

“It’s not midnight,” he said, because of course he knew exactly what he was doing. It was all they’d talked about all day.

“I know that,” Ren retorted. Embarrassment wasn’t an emotion Ren was particularly familiar with, nor was it one he ever wanted to grow accustomed to. He wiped his burning face with his hand like he could erase it and squeezed past Akechi in the doorway.

“Did you see anything?” Akechi asked before he could flee to the bathroom.

“Nope,” Ren lied.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Haha Ren has a CRUSH!
> 
> I also have a crush on everybody who's left me kudos and comments and encouraged me to keep going, you're all the best, I love you! <3


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- references to murder, violence, and torture  
> \- scars

Ren liked Akechi.

The thought settled. He felt it out. Let it stay.

Ren liked Akechi, and he probably had done for a long time.

Not from the start. Surely not. The first time they’d met Ren thought he was a pretentious asshole, pompous and ingenuine - and obviously there was nothing wrong with his character judgement, because he hadn’t been wrong about any of that. Those feelings couldn’t possibly have formed during those tense hangouts around Tokyo scoping each other out, analysing the danger they posed to each other over coffee and not-dates. He would have _noticed._ They were _his_ feelings.

So, when?

Maybe it started when Akechi told him he hated him, that first glimpse of complicated honesty before his subsequent murder attempt. Maybe a little bit more when he watched Akechi crumble in the engine room, that raw and painful look at who the second coming of the detective prince really was inside, the desperation and the loneliness, how excruciatingly willing he’d been to throw his life away to finish his plan and to stubbornly get out of owing them anything. When the wall fell between them and he’d had to suffocate the feeling of realising too late before it festered.

No.

It was probably from somewhere between the moment he walked out of prison and into Leblanc on New Year’s Day and the moment that Akechi ordered him to let him die again. And he didn’t know what that said about him as a person, but it was probably nothing good.

Akechi slept curled in on his side with the blanket between his legs, one in and one out in a way that felt oddly apt, because Akechi was always on the cusp of being there and then not. It wasn’t even six yet and the rain had long since stopped, so he could hear the soft breaths that passed his parted lips as clearly as if they were sleeping in the same bed. He looked young. Everyone looked young when they were sleeping, but it felt especially evident with Akechi, who had always done everything he could to seem older, to fit in with the crowd he’d fallen into. Asleep he was honest. His hair fell over his face and all Ren wanted to do was brush it back – nothing more than that, just that one, innocent thing that somehow didn’t feel innocent at all to him.

He didn’t. Obviously.

Ren liked Akechi, but that didn’t mean he was going to do anything about it. That didn’t mean it was going to change anything. He could acknowledge the feeling without giving it power. Maybe he could even enjoy the warmth of it, the quiet yearning nobody but him ever needed to know about. There was no harm in that.

His alarm woke Akechi up at eight.

Any trace of the storm had evaporated overnight; the streets were as cracked and dry as they had been all week. The bus timetable had changed since he’d last been in Inaba, so they had to sit in the shelter for a full forty minutes waiting to be taken to the other side of town, bickering over Ren’s lack of foresight. When the bus finally arrived it was somehow already sticky, mostly empty except for the odd old person who staggered on for two stops then disappeared again. They sat at the back, but Akechi still sat near enough to him to bump elbows every time they drove over a pothole. Maybe he was just getting used to having Ren in his personal space.

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever been on a bus before,” he said after a lengthy silence.

“Are you enjoying it?” Ren asked, innocently. 

Sitting with as little of his body touching the seat as he reasonably could, Akechi cast a withering look his way. “We should have walked.”

Ren snorted.

Two former students worked at the Municipal hospital, one a nurse, one a receptionist. Neither had any particularly useful information to share, though the nurse did say he’d had some success with the Midnight Channel himself – and swore he saw Saki Konishi the night before her death. Which was interesting, but almost everybody they’d spoken to had seen or knew somebody who’d seen their ‘soulmate’ in the television screen, and there’d only been three murders - something to remember, sure, but probably nothing important. They took the opportunity to ask another sweet, elderly nurse about the fog, too, but she and everyone else seemed to have put its negative health effects down to pollution in the area after the opening of Junes. That didn’t explain why it had disappeared after a year, but he got the impression that nobody really wanted to question why – they were just happy it had stopped.

All in all, it was another unsuccessful trip.

But he had high hopes for the Amagi Inn. Yukiko was the only person they knew of alive and still in Inaba who was said to have shown up on the Midnight Channel, and Ren had found an awful lot of photographs of her and Chie together online. 

Despite it’s renown in the local area, he’d never actually visited the inn before - it wasn’t really somewhere for kids to hang out, and as an adult he’d spent as much time away from Inaba as he could. The moment they walked through the door he could see how it had become so lauded. It was like something out of a period drama, beautiful and classical. Being there made him feel like he should speak in whispers. He made a mental note to bring Yusuke the next time he visited; it was the sort of place he’d look at home in.

“I’m afraid Yukiko won’t be working today,” the kindly faced old woman behind the desk said, bowing apologetically. “Please visit us again tomorrow.”

So, they couldn’t find Yukiko either.

“Satonaka called her,” Akechi mumbled to himself as they sat back in the bus shelter.

“You’re being paranoid,” Ren replied, though he could have very well been right. “If she was avoiding us, she would have taken the week off.”

Akechi stayed stubbornly silent. Sulking, Ren might have called it, if he didn’t value his life. He’d realised that Akechi was very good at making deductions and putting plans into place, but he struggled to predict how other people would react to them - he always expected them to be won over by his charm, to just go along with whatever he said. Being a celebrity had probably helped with that. Now that glamour had dimmed he was left with nothing but his (admittedly incredible) good looks, and he clearly wasn’t used to that not working on everyone.

With three days left they were running out of avenues to explore.

But there was no need to return to his parent’s house to talk about their next steps. The heat was less oppressive than it had been the past few days, and there was a gentle breeze in the air. If they followed the river upstream…

“Want to see the mountains?” Ren asked.

Akechi looked back at it, towering just a mile or two away.

“Alright.”

Ren hadn’t been to the mountains since the annual campout in his first year of high school, though before that he’d spent plenty of time on the hiking trails with his parents and grandparents. Not that he planned to take Akechi anywhere that would take too much effort; Ren hadn’t really kept up with his rigorous training regimes once he’d lost his wildcard abilities, excluding a few runs with Ryuji when they had the time - hadn’t really seen the point. They took what he believed to be the easiest route, and while it wasn’t completely deserted, the hikers that passed them by were intermittent enough to let them talk freely.

“I didn’t think it’d be this difficult. Makoto found us easily.”

“Oh, please, it’s not as if you were well hidden. That cocky self-righteousness of yours was impossible to miss. Obviously whoever we are dealing with here is a higher calibre.”

“Or it might have something to do with it being ten years ago.”

Akechi made a noncommittal sound that probably meant _good point_.

Solid dirt and pebbles crunched pleasingly beneath his feet. It was a beautiful walk, vibrant and green and quiet. Scattered light seeped through the bright leaves that sheltered them from the worst of the sun’s rays, temperature milder than it had been for days. Easy walks like this were the only things he ever truly missed about Inaba.

A couple passed them on their way down; he waited for their soft giggling to fade away before speaking again.

“What if the persona users we find don’t know how to get to the Velvet Room either?”

“I’m hoping that they took their situation more seriously than you and actually bothered to ask questions,” came Akechi’s predictably biting response. Because obviously Ren had never tried to ask why he was imprisoned by tiny twin girls in his dreams. Obviously. “Regardless, we’re more likely to be able to find a way in with information from an additional source.”

“And if they aren’t interested in helping us?”

“Then we’ll just have to make them,” he said cheerily, a tone of voice which on Akechi always made Ren’s stomach sink.

The smirk that twisted Akechi’s lips told him his concern had shown.

“That was a joke. Do you really think I would hurt anyone who could help me understand where I’ve been for four years? I know I told you to doubt me, but that is just hurtful.”

“Right, it’s crazy to think you might try and hurt someone who could help you.”

The smirk remained as Akechi sped up imperceptibly, just enough to be walking slightly ahead of him. “I never did torture anyone, you know. I don’t have the patience for it.”

“Great.”

He glanced back over his shoulder. “Does it make you uncomfortable, to hear me talk about this?”

“No,” he answered, not even sure himself if that was true or not. “I want to understand you.”

“Hm. What do you want to know?”

Free reign to pry - equal measures of terrifying and tantalising. There was so much Ren knew he shouldn’t want to know.

“Who was the hardest person to kill?”

“None of them were hard to kill. All I did was pull a trigger.”

Stupid question.

“Okay. Do you regret killing anyone?”

“No,” he replied, light and airy as the sights surrounding them. “The vast majority of them were people who were in league with Shido until they weren’t. I didn’t run around shooting innocents - most of the time. Present company excluded, if we can consider you innocent.”

He pictured Wakaba Isshiki sat at a booth in Leblanc laughing with Futaba, teasing Sojiro. Young and bright with so much to live for. Innocent, without a doubt. 

“Innocent enough to not deserve shooting in the head,” Ren said dully, though he wasn’t really thinking about himself at all.

Akechi scoffed. “Deserve? With your death, I was one step closer to putting a stop to Shido. ‘Deserve’ didn’t come into it. It’s a classic ethical conundrum – can a morally wrong action that leads to a good outcome truly be wrong? Is it morally sound to kill someone if you have reasonable grounds to believe that their death would lead to the defeat of an evil that was otherwise undefeatable? You yourself are not immune to consequentialism. For example, when you agreed to sacrifice me to end Maruki’s nightmare, you committed an action that you found apprehensible for a positive outcome.”

“But you sacrificed yourself because you thought it was the right thing to do.”

Though he couldn’t see his face, he heard the wry smile on Akechi’s lips. “In that regard, you think far too highly of me.”

It was hard to gleam the truths from Akechi’s words, particularly with Ren’s own want for there to be something within him that was redeemable - something that made liking him as much as he did make sense - clouding his judgement. Akechi lied even to himself, especially to himself, a coping mechanism for all the unforgivable things he’d done. Maybe he really didn’t regret any of his actions, but Ren couldn’t help but wonder if he’d had walked in front of him on purpose, to better guard his expressions.

Either way the conversation had soured, and Ren had no further interest in Akechi’s dark past. Not today, at least. Small doses.

They reached where the river turned into a deep, clear pool headed by a lazy waterfall, and took it as a natural place to stop and rest without discussion. Akechi crouched at the bank and scooped water into his hands to drink while Ren lay in a sunny spot in the tall grass, staring up at the clear blue sky.

Fuck. He couldn’t get Wakaba’s smile out of his head. Stupid. It had been shaping up to be such a nice day, too. He shouldn’t have asked.

Akechi sat at his feet and watched him wordlessly in that empty way he did when he was analysing something, when he was thinking too hard to mind his face. It was the kind of look that stripped him bare and made him squirm inside.

“Why would you ask the question if you can’t handle the answer?” he asked quietly.

“I can handle it. It’s not easy to understand your point of view, but I’m trying. Thanks for telling me.”

Akechi frowned at the waterfall with that same interrogative glare for a long time. Ren just listened. The splashing was white noise, drowning out the parts he didn’t want to think about. That and the warmth on his face and chest was almost enough to tempt him to sleep, but he felt Akechi shift and thought better of it. Slowly he rose to his elbows and saw he’d turned his back to him.

“Akechi?”

“If you dare respond to anything I’m about to say, I promise you I’ll take another of your nine lives,” he said. “This is because you want to know. Not because I need to talk about it.”

“Okay,” Ren drew out.

A long pause followed.

“I’m not entirely without guilt for… some of my actions. Most of my targets were vile pieces of shit that no sane person would mourn, but there were certainly people who, as you so eloquently put it, had done nothing to ‘deserve’ being hurt, and in those rare situations I rationalised that if I didn’t carry out Shido’s will somebody else would, whether it be another persona user or a mafia hitman. You asked if anybody was hard to kill? Of course there were some that were more difficult than others, but the closer I got to defeating him, the easier it was to ignore the collateral damage. Ultimately, regretting any of it is pointless. It happened. I did it all of my own volition. There’s nothing that will change that. I refuse to waste any more time on it.”

Ren sat up straight but stopped himself short of sitting by Akechi’s side. _Don’t respond,_ he said _._ Okay. He could definitely just listen to Akechi being open and honest with him without engaging with it. He didn’t have to confirm that he understood better now, or thank him, or put a hand on his shoulder, or…

He tore his eyes away from Akechi’s back and stared up at the waterfall, at the craggy rocks that climbed up beside it.

He had to say _something_.

He said, “Think you can beat me to the top?”

Akechi craned his neck for a silent moment as if in contemplation.

Without warning, his hand shot back and shoved Ren’s chest hard enough to throw him to the ground as he propelled himself to his feet and sprinted to the closest foothold. Ren coughed in indignant surprise and stumbled messily after him, fingers digging deep into coarse rocks that dug sharply into his fingers in return. It wasn’t high, maybe twenty feet or so, but the route up wasn’t exactly clear; by the time he pulled himself over the top, Akechi was sat cross legged in the grass with a pleasant smile ruined somewhat by the smugness that rolled from him in waves.

“I win,” he said.

“You cheated.”

“I would have won regardless. You were miles behind.”

Never mind. Ren didn’t like Akechi after all. Akechi was an asshole and a cheat.

He didn’t say that, though. Instead, he said, “Bet I can beat you to the bottom,” and kicked back off the waterfall’s edge before Akechi could respond.

Shockingly cold water engulfed him, and for a few seconds all he could hear was the muted sound of the rushing falls until another splash broke the surface, and Ren emerged gasping for air just in time to see Akechi do the same, a scowl peaking out from behind soaked hair that stuck flat to his face.

“Still a sore loser, I see,” he said breathlessly, still adjusting to the temperature.

Ren shook the water from his hair like a dog and Akechi splashed back in retaliation a little too aggressively, so Ren splashed him too and then they were throwing water at each other like school children - pointlessly, aimlessly, just because they could. Akechi did that laugh again, the one that was supposed to be malicious but accidentally was not, and Ren had to sink back beneath the water to straighten his face to stop it from betraying how the sound made his heart ache because that voice in his head was increasing in volume, and it was screaming _kiss him, kiss him, kiss him,_ and he couldn’t. Because Akechi trusted him in his own, too-proud way. He was making an effort. Ren’s goal to befriend him – actually befriend him – seemed to have worked, so he couldn’t, absolutely could _not,_ let his daydreams become reality and risk ruining that. Not when it had taken such a long time to get to where they were. Certainly not when he knew that he was the only person in the world Akechi could trust.

By the time he resurfaced Akechi was slogging his way toward the pool’s edge, his heavy clothes, evidently not intended for swimming, weighing him down. Ren joined him. The feeling of soaking fabric clinging to his body was deeply unpleasant out of the water, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret taking the plunge when it had made Akechi laugh like that. His hand went to his jeans pocket to assess the damage the fall had caused to his phone, but miraculously, it seemed intact.

One look at the time cancelled that temporary relief.

“Shit.” Akechi looked at him with his hair swept back off his face and his t-shirt sticking to every part of his torso. _Not now, Akechi._ “It’s late. We’re going to miss the last bus.”

All the hope in the world couldn’t get them back down the mountain fast enough to catch the bus, though it did get them just close enough to see it pull away from the curb and roll over the hill and out of sight. Running that last stretch would have been pointless; they’d already come to terms with their mistake and the punishing prospect of walking another five and a half miles back.

“What are our options?” Akechi asked.

Ren sat beneath the bus shelter and lolled his head back, letting out a deep sigh. “One, we walk. Two, we call my dad.” He wrinkled his nose at the thought of the disappointed silence that would accompany that journey back. “Three, we sleep right here.”

Unsurprisingly, Akechi looked equally unimpressed with all their options.

“Why not stay at the inn? We can find Amagi in the morning.”

“It’s expensive,” Ren said.

“We can split the bill.”

Well, it wasn’t as if he had any other plans for the rest of the summer any way.

It was close to the end of July, and so late in the day the entrance hall was busy with guests dressed in blue and red yukatas quietly socialising. Mostly older, mostly couples, of course. Sharing a room with Akechi there wouldn’t be any weirder than sharing his bedroom, he tried to convince himself, but he had a good feeling he would suggest they use the hot springs before bed, and that would do little to help his rapidly crumbling resolve not to do anything stupid and impulsive - which had never been one of his strong points in the first place.

Being in their room took him back to the first time Ann took them to the buffet, an indulgent feeling accompanied by an inescapable sense of misplacement. Everything was the colour of old parchment and felt as delicate as it too, a barebones museum framed with finely decorated paper screens. Akechi took its unfamiliarity in his stride, of course. He was well practiced at being in places he didn’t belong, acting the adult before he’d even been close to one – evidently this was no different.

Well, Ren wasn’t bad at pretending either. He sent a quick text to his mother before throwing himself down on one of the two futons, and he closed his eyes until suddenly Akechi was kicking him awake for dinner, which meant that they actually had to change into the yukatas and go downstairs.

It gave him some small comfort that Akechi looked as ridiculous and out of place in one as he did.

The dinner itself was predictably excellent, particularly after a long day walking in the heat, and almost made the steep price tag worth it. But Yukiko was nowhere to be found.

When they returned to their room Akechi said, “Are you joining me in the hot springs?”

He should have said no and avoided the emotional turmoil, but he was becoming increasingly aware of the lingering smell of riverbed and the growing ache in his out-of-use muscles, so he braced himself and hummed an affirmative instead. He’d seen Akechi naked before, and while he hadn’t exactly been attracted to him back then he certainly hadn’t been _unattracted_ to him - there was a reason he’d had such a legion of fans, after all. Besides, Ren wasn’t some horny teenager who couldn’t control himself at the sight of another man’s naked body. But still. It felt different now. Intimate, somehow. It made him very conscious about where he looked, and he was glad when they sunk beneath the water even if the heat neared overwhelming.

“Do you remember the bath house at Yongen-Jaya?” Akechi asked. “You insisted that the temperature wasn’t getting to you, even though your face was bright red.”

“Because you made it a competition,” Ren reminded him.

“The same’s true now. Red as a tomato.”

“It’s over thirty degrees outside.” Ren frowned and held his cheeks in his hands, which were unsurprisingly searing. Akechi seemed incapable of blushing.

He wasn’t sure if it was the heat that was going to kill him or Akechi’s pursuing laugh that verged dangerously close to a giggle. It was quite probably the best mood he’d ever seen him in.

The springs were beautiful and relatively busy after dinner, but not so much that it was difficult to move around or that they had to be concerned about anyone listening in on their conversations. Old men unperturbed by the temperature found absent corners to talk amongst themselves. So when Akechi hummed contentedly and stretched his arms above his head so that Ren could see the deep, round scar to the left of his navel, Ren didn’t hesitate to ask about it.

“That’s new,” he said, letting Akechi follow his gaze downwards. Was it weird that he remembered which scars he’d had five years ago and which he hadn’t?

Akechi’s expression didn’t seem to suggest it. He lowered his arms again and shrugged.

“It is. I believe it must have been from our fight in Shido’s palace. Or perhaps my poor, stupid cognitive self was able to hit me after all.”

Ren frowned, still staring. “It’s a painful place to be shot.”

Akechi placed his hand over the now-old wound. “I would imagine so. Fortunately, I have no recollection of being wounded nor of the healing process. Lucky me.”

“How did you get out with an injury like that?”

“I suppose I could have died,” Akechi replied bluntly. “Perhaps your friends in the Velvet Room resurrected me.”

“It wasn’t them,” Ren said. “We destroyed Shido’s palace before Igor came back. There shouldn’t have been anything left, and Yaldabaoth didn’t seem the type to help anyone. Why wouldn’t Lavenza tell me, either?”

“You do realise the whole purpose of this trip was to answer those questions? Besides, it’s not impossible that I survived, escaped, and died outside of the Metaverse.”

But it _was_ impossible. Futaba lost his signal, and the only way out was back past them.

“Are you really only realising how strange this all is now?” Akechi asked.

“I was just happy you were back,” Ren admitted sheepishly.

Akechi looked at him like he was insane, which was par for the course whenever he said something that indicated he had any sort of positive feelings towards him; confessing that he’d spent the past twenty-four hours fighting off the urge to kiss him would probably make him short circuit.

Maybe he could tell him one day once the feelings had passed and they could laugh about it.

That didn’t seem like it would be any time soon. Akechi fell unusually quiet and stared at him for so long that it was beginning to get uncomfortable before spitting out what must have been an agonising, “Thanks.”

Ren tilted his head curiously. “What for?”

He just rolled his eyes and shook his head. _Never mind._

Half an hour passed and they’d both had enough, no energy left to stubbornly deny their mutual discomfort. Even if he wanted to, the way he stumbled and grabbed at Akechi’s shoulder as he dragged himself out the springs was a dead giveaway. Akechi snorted and helped him upright like a good, completely and unavoidably naked friend and held onto his arm to support him for much longer than Ren deemed necessary, one eyebrow cocked in amusement. Which was, of course, all Ren thought about as they dried off and redressed, all the way until they were laid down on their respective futons placed side by side on the floor.

“Did you thank me for being your friend?” Ren asked. The long day had worn down his filter; the hot springs had fogged his brain.

Akechi rolled over to look at him. They were so fucking close. As he squinted and tried to make sense of his unprompted question Ren watched him and felt his insides gnaw themselves to pieces. 

His eyes dropped to the space in between them, but Ren didn’t stop looking. He could kiss him. He could close the distance with no more effort than craning his neck and stop the ache or make it so much worse.

“For keeping your promises.”

Akechi lifted his eyes and forced him to abort his impulse immediately. The distant sound of whispered conversation passing by their room anchored him in reality. Akechi analysed him with furrowed brows but otherwise made no indication that he’d realised what Ren had been about to do; he just looked puzzled. Ren didn’t want to think about what he looked like. With a weak smile that might have been a grimace he flipped onto his side and turned away to fall into yet another restless sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ehehehehe
> 
> Why do all of my chapters end with Ren falling to sleep?? Oops
> 
> Anyway! God this chapter feels long! I didn't fancy splitting it though. Thank you again for the comments and kudos! I'm not used to writing for popular ships, it's honestly lovely haha <3


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CWs:  
> \- Discussion about suicide/suicidal thoughts  
> \- Background Chie/Yukiko
> 
> Also: I've only played vanilla P3 and P4 and none of the little spin offs! So you'll have to suspend your disbelief for some of this chapter and pretend you've also only played those games. Sorry!!

Muted sunlight filtered through the paper screens, soft and white. A nostalgic ache tensed his muscles like he’d run through a palace, and for a moment he let himself dream that he had: he and his friends and his infinite well of personas been eliminating shadows across the ship’s deck (it was always a ship) in pursuit of some villain using his authority to pin crimes on innocents and boost his numbers at work (it was always a cop), and now they were going to meet downstairs and discuss how best to send the calling card over coffee and curry. Akechi was there.

Breath skimmed over the back of his neck.

He could feel Akechi’s warmth, close but not touching, quiet huffs of breath slow and warm and steady. Still sleeping, unaware that he’d drifted towards him during the night.

Surely it wasn’t hurting anyone if they just stayed like that.

He let his eyelids fall closed, let the dream take over again. They’d chase down the villain and watch him transform into something monstrous, too many hands holding too many batons. Futaba and Makoto would work out a brilliant strategy as Ren worked through the sea of demons within him and narrowed down their weaknesses. Ann would decimate him with her magic, and Ryuji and Yusuke and Haru and Sumire would take turns slicing and slamming and shooting their way through his armour. Akechi would scream something dark and damning. And he’d crumble and fall to his knees against a backdrop that was indistinguishable except for that it was rich and luxurious and cold and blue.

Akechi sniffed and shuffled behind him. His posture seemed to change, suddenly rigid. Reality seeped back to him, but Ren pretended it hadn’t. Akechi stayed there, perfectly still. He heard him swallow. Then, after a few short minutes of nothing, he exhaled through his nose and rolled away, pushed himself up from beneath thin covers and rose to his feet.

“Get up,” he ordered shortly after. Ren grumbled and rested back on his elbows, blinking the sleep from his eyes. Akechi had his back turned as he changed back into yesterday’s clothes. “There should be a few hours before any new guests check in. Let’s corner Amagi before it’s busy.”

They dressed in a drowsy silence, and Ren deeply regretted missing the last bus because his clothes were stale and stiff, sure to give a poor first impression. Ren had never been a morning person; Akechi finished long before he did and watched him stumble around the room as he waited, arms folded over his chest, foot tapping impatiently on the tatami mat.

“Must you move so slow?” he asked. Apparently, he’d woken up on the wrong (Ren’s) side of the bed.

“I can move slower.” He pulled on his jeans as if his legs were made of glass, and Akechi rolled his eyes so hard he swore he heard it.

“Meet me downstairs.”

Ren smirked to himself and finished dressing, but when he pulled on his final sock he stood and stared at it until the smirk felt tired and heavy.

How could it have gotten so bad so quick? Ren had never been one to fall foul to longing, never let a crush stay a crush without acting on it - what was the point in sitting back and wondering? He hadn’t cared what anybody thought in a long time, so if he confessed to someone who didn’t feel the same way then he could shrug it off and move on, no love lost, life would continue the same as always. He’d never been one to stay up late into the night fretting over feelings, interrogating intentions, never lost sleep over anyone but Akechi. What made Akechi so different?

Because Akechi was complicated. Because Akechi was an ancient what-if. Because Akechi had always occupied his own special space in Ren’s heart.

He really needed to pull himself together if he didn’t want everything else to fall apart.

Downstairs, he found Akechi engaged in conversation with a pale woman with jet black hair that sat below her waist, soft and dainty and beautiful. He recognised her instantly from TV; Yukiko Amagi, the inn’s manager. Much like Akechi she seemed to have her polite smile down to an art (perhaps there really wasn’t much difference being in television and customer service), though she held herself tight and tense, eyes darting to Ren the moment he walked through the entrance. Unfortunately, he wasn’t there to give her any relief.

“I know why you’re here,” Yukiko spoke quietly. “You want to know about the murders.”

“If you would be so kind,” Akechi said as Ren came to stand by his side.

“Sorry to disappoint you, but Chie and I shared a class. Our experiences were largely the same; I remember there being a lot of excitement and fear, and there were rumours circulating about the true nature of the fog-” 

“And what of the rumoured Midnight Channel? Did anyone suspect that it may have played a role in the deaths?”

Contemplation creased her forehead, and she looked to and fro between them in silence for a surprisingly long time, and neither of them felt the need to urge her on; she had this energy about her, calm and regal, that made interrupting her seem as forbidden as screaming in a library.

“What are you really looking for?” she asked.

Ren and Akechi shared a look. Akechi shrugged and nodded.

“The Velvet Room,” Ren said. “We need to go back.”

Her reaction was measured, eyes widened just a fraction the only indication of her surprise, and she gave a short nod too. He felt Akechi lean forward.

“I understand. Chie thought it might be something like that.” A fond smile twitched over her face. “Our leader was the only one who ever had access to the Velvet Room, and he lives in Tokyo now. Would you happen to be free tomorrow evening? We could meet up and do our best to help you with whatever it is that you need.”

“Are you a persona user?” Ren asked. The respected manager of the Amagi Inn running around palaces with her friends, slaughtering shadows… now that was an image.

Her smile widened. “I was. A long time ago, now. Chie and I are going to eat at the Chinese Diner in the Central Shopping District tomorrow at seven, if you’d like to join us for dinner. Please forgive my rudeness, but it looks as though there are other guests checking out. I hope you enjoyed your stay.”

She bowed courteously and swept over to an older couple waiting at the desk, and that was that. They had a lead – a solid lead. Other persona users. Akechi had been right, and he seemed somewhat startled at how easily it had all played out, staring after Yukiko in a daze.

“Good job, detective,” Ren said.

“Stop it. I’m not a detective anymore.”

In the moment he didn’t sound it, but Ren wondered if that hurt to say.

They decided to go back to Ren’s parent’s house. Their hike had wiped them of any desire to spend any more energy wandering aimlessly around the town, not least because Akechi had already seen all two of its major attractions.

Being inside during the daytime felt bizarre, now, because whenever he visited he did everything in his power to stay out of his parent’s way. Downstairs he could hear his mother pottering around the house cleaning nothing since that was all she ever did and their house was already immaculate. While Akechi showered and changed into something less pond-watery Ren gave his customary offer to help, only to receive her customary dismissal in return; she didn’t like help, but she did like when he asked to, a delicate but dangerous line he’d always had to toe.

So, for the second time he tried to set up his PlayStation, this time without Akechi looming over his shoulder, just to have something to do for a few hours, and once again he failed. In the daylight he could see frayed wires poking through near the connection and wondered what he’d done as a child to cause so much destruction to something that looked so sturdy. He sent a short text to his dad to see if they had a spare somewhere, but he wasn’t holding out much hope. 

When it was finally his turn to shower, he found himself zoned out watching the suds swirl and disappear down the drain, foaming hands still and tangled in his curls. Not thinking about anything, really, until he caught himself doing it. Then he realised that he was, for some reason, upset, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out why. Because he was back in his hometown? Because their investigation was almost over? Because maybe this stupid crush was going to be harder to keep under control than he’d expected?

Because… Yukiko said she had been a persona user a long time ago, and if it was all over for her, then maybe that meant it was really all over for the Phantom Thieves, too?

Not that he hadn’t known that, deep down. Obviously, he knew that. But it was like with Akechi – there was always that suspicion, that painful hope, that things might one day continue.

But one out of two hopeless dreams wasn’t bad, was it?

“Are you listening to me?” Akechi asked.

Ren looked up. He’d been rubbing a towel through his hair for a while, unaware of Akechi’s eyes following him. “Sorry,” he said.

“Will you just spit it out already? Whatever it is that’s going on beneath all that stupid hair of yours.”

“You think it’s stupid?”

The look Akechi gave him packed more punch than a bullet to the head. Maybe he should have weaponised that instead.

He just chose the easiest problem.

“It’s weird that they’re normal people now,” he said. “Normal jobs, no persona. It’s hard to imagine being that way.”

“And you’ve had five years to get used to the fact. Do you miss it so much?”

Ren nodded.

“You have no reason to. You still have your life. Your friends.”

“Not a… purpose, though.” Akechi was going to hate the next part, but he needed to say it anyway. “She tried, but Sae couldn’t follow through on her promise. The people in charge never change, and now I can’t help anyone. I can’t change the world. I can’t even-“

“Work out all that anger on some poor, pathetic shadow?”

Maybe he wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but there was little sense in correcting him on semantics, because really, he’d hit the nail on the head. Ren missed tearing his way through palaces and feeling their successes in their aches and exhaustion, and he missed hacking deserving targets to pieces. There was satisfaction in it that could never be replicated in the real world. Not without being sent back to prison, anyway.

“Yeah.”

Akechi smiled wryly. “There is nothing here that comes close to scratching that itch. This reality is so mundane it makes me want to claw off my own skin.”

“What are you going to do after this?”

“I have no long-term plans,” Akechi said. “I want to know what happened to me, to fill in the gaps, and then… who knows. A miserable life of capitalist servitude. Or suicide - I have considered it. Put a quick end to the boredom and save anyone else the trouble. I suppose that would be the right thing to do.”

Alarm froze him rigid. “Goro.”

Akechi waved his hand dismissively. “Save your heartfelt speeches. I considered it briefly and decided against it. I refuse to follow in either of my parent’s footsteps.”

“Promise me.”

The urgency with which he spat out his words seemed to be enough to convince Akechi to take his own life seriously, if only for a minute, and with equal alarm he stared back and said, “I promise.”

Ren buried his head in his hands. Took a deep breath. To his credit, Akechi acknowledged Ren’s obvious discomfort and held back on his usual needling about sentimentality or being stupid for caring or whatever it was that amused him so much about his ability to express healthy human emotions. He let the silence sit a while, spacious and empty but for the distant sound of hoovering.

Losing Akechi like that wasn’t something he was sure he could come back from. 

Eventually, Akechi asked, “And what of you? What are you planning to do with that degree of yours?”

“No clue.”

He breathed a laugh, dry, one syllable.

And that was it. The conversation suffocated and died. And like they weren’t both stuck in the wrong realm, they idled the day away on their phones (no Metaverse App in sight) until sleep came and went and the day wasted away, and it was time to meet the others, apparently much better adapted to living a life in the real world.

They saw Chie first, and she seemed far more enthused to be in their company than before, standing and waving her hand above her head to summon them to their table so passionately it drew the attention of the other diners. A gentler hand clasped it in the air and pulled it down – Yukiko’s, he assumed correctly before they even saw her. Across from them sat a man he didn’t recognise who looked downright bizarre next to them, bleached blonde hair scraped back to show a heavy scar above his eyebrow with a face set in a natural, intimidating scowl. A group so strange they had to have a secret. Akechi and Ren looked fittingly unfitting joining them, he was sure.

“You made it!” Chie beamed, scooting over for Ren to take a seat beside her and leaving Akechi to sit awkwardly next to the stranger. “You know, you guys could have just said what you really wanted instead of sneaking around asking all those suspicious questions. You scared the hell out of me! I thought you were trying to expose us all for going to that other world or something.”

“Sorry,” Ren said.

“Chie, let them order.”

“Yeah, sorry. Akechi! Inaba’s speciality is steak, so you better try it before you leave. Oh, and this is Kanji Tatsumi. He wanted to meet you too.”

“What’s up?”

They ordered food and listened as the remnants of the Inaba persona users excitedly interrupted each other to tell the tale of the mysterious Midnight Channel, because Akechi was, of course, completely correct – everything was connected, from the murders, to the rumours, to the fog. He shot Ren smug look after smug look as if Ren had ever doubted his detective skills, but he let him have his moment, because clearly this was about proving something to himself as much as it was to him. They told them about how persona users could enter the TV world and throw others in. About the misguided man who’d tried to save them all and put their lives in danger instead. Their shadow selves, their dungeons, the copycat killer, the true, persona-wielding culprit behind bars. Everything sounded so similar, just… a little to the left, like a new season of a long-awaited show that had him on the edge of his seat.

Akechi looked to Yukiko. “And you said that only your leader ever entered the Velvet Room?”

“Yes. He said I can give you his number for you to speak to him in person when you return to Tokyo.”

“Hey, why do you want to go back to the Velvet Room so badly?” Chie asked.

He finished his bite and neatly wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. “Ah, well. I died five years ago, and I would like to find out why I am back.”

Some of the excitement dissipated. Chie’s nervous giggle filled the brief pause in conversation, like she wasn’t sure whether to take Akechi seriously.

“Oh. Wow, that must be… really difficult. I guess you must want answers.”

“Wouldn’t you?” he continued conversationally.

Kanji slammed his hands on the table. “Alright, come on, we told you everything – now it’s your turn to talk.” 

And honestly, there was nothing Ren wanted to do more, because there were only so many times he could reminisce with his friends about events they’d been party to - a new audience was exactly what he needed.

He asked, “Did you ever hear about the Phantom Thieves?”

And they really did feel like an audience, gasping and cheering and laughing as he gave his dramatic retellings of the events of each palace. Ren’s cheeks hurt from the weight of his grin, and every so often he glanced to Akechi to see him shaking his head or rolling his eyes in an almost fond sort of way that made him want to keep on talking until the restaurant kicked them out, just to see more of it. There were some parts he skipped, mood dampeners and awkward things like that the dead man sat across from him had betrayed him and his friends by trying to put a bullet in his head. Akechi cocked an eyebrow at that, but thankfully resisted making a scene over his omissions.

While Akechi and Yukiko waited for the bill, he, Chie, and Kanji exchanged numbers outside.

Chie inhaled the mild night air and beamed. “You know, this was so much fun. I wonder how many other persona users are out there.”

“Akechi found five other leads,” Ren said.

“That’s so crazy! Honestly, I never even thought about looking for anyone else.”

“Don’t you miss it?”

“Well, yeah, of course! We all do. How can you not miss being a part of something so… huge and world changing? I still dream about having Tomoe by my side when I’m out there fighting crime - it would make things _so_ much easier,” she laughed. “Everyone misses the things they got up to when they were teenagers, though. You questioned half the town, right? You saw their faces talking about the goofy stuff they got up to at school? It’s totally normal. It might not seem like it now, but growing up and living in this world isn’t as scary as it sounds. Yeah, you have to get a real job and pay bills, and that all _sucks_. But if your team was anything like ours, it’s all that time you got to spend with your friends that you really miss anyway, and that never has to stop. It never will stop! Going through something like that together gives you friends for life.”

Kanji snorted. “You’re making us sound old, Chie.”

“I’m trying to be heartfelt here!” She bashed her fist into Kanji’s arm and made him groan. “Look, we just shared our persona stories today. That was only one year of us hanging out, like, twelve years ago. We got up to all kinds of dumb things since then. Next time you’re in Inaba we’re gonna hang out and I’m gonna tell you all the things you can _never_ tell my boss.”

Ren smiled. “Sounds good.”

“Oh, and, uh, before they come out, I was kind of wondering…” Chie began, glancing behind Ren like she was making sure the coast was clear. “I mean, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. But you and Akechi… is that…?”

Ren blinked.

“You know what, never mind.”

But because he was a glutton for punishment, he pushed on anyway. “Why did you think that?”

“Other than how I found you outside the police station?” she said, ignoring the way Kanji’s eyes darted between them. “I’m sorry, I know it’s none of my business, but the way he was looking at you when you were telling us about the Phantom Thieves? It was painful.”

“He was probably trying to get me to hurry up,” he countered.

“Yeah. Uh, I don’t think so.” He heard the doors open behind him and saw Chie’s face light up. At him she mouthed the words _trust me_ before taking Yukiko’s hands in her own and pecking her softly on the lips. Then she turned back and said, “See you soon!”

“Yeah. See you.”

Akechi came to stand beside him as they watched the strange but oh-so-similar Investigation Team wave over their shoulders and walk away.

“They’re idiots,” Akechi said with a vague kind of wonder.

“Is it impossible for you to be nice?”

“No,” he shrugged. “But you prefer me when I’m honest.”

“Is that what you want? For me to like you?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want. You like me regardless.”

Did he have any idea how right he was? Ren searched his face, seeking out some semblance of a clue that might reveal even an inch of what he was thinking. All he gleamed was that Akechi very much did not appreciate being examined so intensely, glancing down the path that would lead them back to his parents’ house instead of meeting his eyes.

There was no way Akechi was attracted to him, but when he tried to mentally sort through the evidence that proved it, he found it lacking. Yes, he’d tried to kill him twice. Yes, he’d said he hated him. Time and time again he’d insisted that Ren was nothing more to him than an annoying obstacle for him to overcome. But he also knew that Akechi was very bad at feeling things, and very good at lying to himself. He knew that he was the only person Akechi tolerated enough to voluntarily spend time with. He knew that he could make Akechi laugh in a way he’d never heard him laugh in front of anyone else.

And he knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything. But it didn’t necessarily… not mean anything, either.

“Fireflies,” Akechi said. They’d walked all the way to the bridge over the river without him realising, and fireflies were indeed skittering prettily over the water’s surface. Akechi stopped and leaned over the bridge’s rail to watch them.

“Did you know that they’re cannibalistic? The females mimic the unique blinking patterns of the other’s genus to lure them in, and then devour them. Sometimes they even eat smaller fireflies of their own kind. They’re truly underhanded little beasts.”

Ren watched their glow bounce off of Akechi’s skin. “Pretty, though,” he said.

Akechi shook his head. “Well, that ‘pretty’ glow is a warning to other predators that they contain lucibufagin – a highly toxic steroid most intelligent creatures learn to avoid. ‘Luci’, by the way, is derived from the Latin _lucifer._ ”

“I still like them.”

One flew up higher than the others; Ren stretched out his hand and grabbed it straight out the air, felt it flutter desperately against his palm. Cupping his other hand over his first, he brought it up to his eye and peaked in through the gap, only for it to immediately break loose and smack into his face with a surprisingly solid thud that made him splutter and stumble back instinctively. An ugly burst of laughter rocked its way through Akechi and doubled him over the rail until it wrecked his voice hoarse.

“Was that supposed to be impressive!?”

Ren grumbled, his pride definitely wounded. Not that it _was_ supposed to be impressive _._ It was just the better of two impulses. Akechi wheezed and wiped a tear from his eye until the shockwaves of his laughter ran dry.

“I have never seen anything so stupid in my life.”

“Alright, alright.” He joined Akechi in resting on the rail, resented how hard it was to stop the smile tugging at his lips. “Go back to your morbid facts.”

A final chuckle slipped out. “That’s all on the subject of fireflies, I’m afraid. Or… I did once read that they can be used to determine if a body has been displaced after death. It was something to do with how the larvae develop within corpses.”

Even with his ego so severely wounded, a tenderness won him over. Akechi was so weird and so pretentious, and smart beyond belief.

“You should still be a detective.” 

He shook his head. “Not without a new legal identity.”

“Maybe a private investigator,” Ren suggested. “I’d join you.”

Akechi looked him up and down, analysing him thoroughly. Smirking. “Are you asking to be my Watson?”

“Your Holmes.”

He scoffed. “Absolutely not.”

“Why do you get to be Holmes?”

“Because I’m far more intelligent than you.”

“That’s conjecture.”

“I think that foolish little display of yours was enough to prove my point.”

Their shoulders and elbows were touching where they rested on the rail and he could taste his heart in his throat, bloody and nauseating with how much it wanted. Akechi’s smile faded when his eyes flinched to Ren’s mouth. He backed out of the distance they’d unwittingly closed and locked his fingers around the railing in a grip so tight the wood creaked. Chie might have been onto something, he realised with no small amount of surprise; maybe it wasn’t a one-way thing. But that didn’t mean Akechi would ever be willing to admit it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eesh, sorry about the slightly longer wait! Busy busy week! 
> 
> I've never seen fireflies in my life so this is me living vicariously through them. Also, I played Persona 4 for the first time when it came out when I was 16 myself so it was kind of satisfying giving Chie dialogue about growing up and how it isn't that scary? This really is the most self indulgent fic, thank you for reading it anyway lmao. Again, thank you for the comments and kudos!


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW:  
> \- difficult parent/child relationship  
> \- sexual content

In less than twenty-four hours, he’d be home in Tokyo.

His fan droned noisily, disturbing loose papers and fluttering the posters on his walls. It hardly seemed to reach him sprawled out on his bed, but knowing he was at least trying to combat the hottest day of the year gave him some comfort. The week leading up to that sweltering Thursday had been nothing more than preparation for the worst-case scenario, a day so uncomfortably warm that Ren could only lie flat beneath his window and wish for death.

Alright. That was a little overdramatic. A more reasonable want was to strip down to his skin, but with the strange atmosphere the previous night had created he decided against testing the boundaries of their relationship any further. Akechi had taken to speaking to him in a short, clipped sentences, honeyed with the politeness he never normally deemed necessary to use with him. At first it had actually stung, the thought that something as small as an awkward moment could set them back so far, but by the late afternoon it was just… annoying. It made him want to poke and prod until he got a more satisfactory reaction.

“What’s your favourite colour?” Ren asked. He heard him flip the page he was on, felt him draw out the seconds before responding.

“Red,” he said.

“Favourite animal?”

The fan spun around the room once. “I don’t have one.”

“Okay. Cats or dogs?”

“Cats.”

He looked around his room for inspiration and settled on an old action figure.

“If you could have any superpower, what would you choose?”

“Persona.”

“No. Something else.”

He could _feel_ his eyes rolling back in his head. “Telepathy.”

He peaked over the edge of the bed to watch Akechi flick through his third-year history textbook – an extraordinarily dry read – as if it was worth the effort of turning the page, and wished very hard for a glimpse into his head, too.

“Longest relationship?”

He turned the book over in his lap and craned his head back to meet his eyes. Victory. “If you’re this bored, you could be arranging a meeting with Narukami.”

“He hasn’t responded yet,” Ren said, reaching for his phone on the windowsill. A blue light was flashing in the corner. “Ah, wait. He wants us to meet him at his house in Ogikubo. He’s invited the rest of the Phantom Thieves, too.”

Akechi groaned.

“Are you going to be able to handle that?”

“I suppose I have no choice.”

Ren texted back:

 **Ren:  
** Sounds good.  
Saturday?

  
Then put his phone face down again.

“You’re supposed to ask questions back,” he said, dragging himself onto his stomach to better see Akechi, who fixed him with an impatient glare far more suited to his face than the impassive disinterest he’d worn for most of the day.

“I have no interest in learning your favourite colour.”

“Red, as well.”

“Wonderful,” Akechi snarked.

“We have nothing else to do. Ask something.”

Akechi shuffled around on the futon to lean back against the desk and face him. “What was that last one, again?”

“Longest relationship?”

“Sure.”

Oh, that asshole. He wasn’t subtle; Ren saw his game. Still, there was a thrill that tingled through every part of him to know that it was that that had piqued Akechi’s curiosity. Another point for team _Akechi likes me back_.

“Four months. Before I moved to Tokyo,” he said. A girl in his class at Yasogami High who always scored a little bit higher than him in their exams. They split in typical dramatic teenage fashion about half a year before the Shido incident and hadn’t spoken since.

“And after you moved to Tokyo?”

That one required a little more thought. Probably the medical student he’d met at Jazz Jin in his second year with the purple hair.

“Three weeks.”

They’d texted a fair amount in that time and hooked up twice, but she was busy, and Ren had never been good at carrying a conversation. Their brief relationship tapered off. He’d had one more amicable interaction with her after when he bumped into her and her new boyfriend a few months later. There’d been a few others: the sullen woman who spent all their classes together reading in his first semester; the rude man he’d first met at Iwai’s who bought him a drink when they met again in Shinjuku. Nothing ever lasted long. Just flings to pass the time.

“The illustrious leader of the Phantom Thieves can’t even hold down a relationship? How pitiful.”

Ren shrugged it off. “Hard to date with secrets like ours.”

“I wonder if that’s all there is to it.”

What did he want him to say? _They weren’t you_? He had the sinking realisation that there might have been more truth to that than he ever wanted to believe, that he might have even been subconsciously seeking out the pieces of Akechi he’d been missing so much and suffering through the painful truth that none of them were the complete puzzle. A very real fear consumed him that that must have been obvious to everyone but him, that the Phantom Thieves had been having whispered discussions about exactly this and his never-ending quest to find Akechi for years, and it was a mortifying thought, one that felt more and more likely the more he replayed old conversations in his head, sideways glances and aborted sentences his friends had tiptoed away from in favour of salting a wound Ren didn’t even realise he had.

Although…

If that were true, that did mean they’d had plenty of time to prepare for Ren to do something stupid.

“It’s hard to find everything I like in one person,” he found himself saying.

“Oh?” Akechi tilted his head.

And he just thought, _Fuck it._

“They have to be intelligent. Ambitious, cunning, brutally honest. Someone who can challenge me and doesn’t care what anyone thinks. Someone I can’t predict. Someone who doesn’t hold back. Maybe even someone who’s a little dangerous. Helps if he’s pretty, too. I was a Phantom Thief, after all.”

And it was brilliant to render Akechi speechless, to watch his surprise paint the tips of his ears red, his mouth opening then closing again wordlessly. It was only a snapshot of a moment before he fixed his mask back into place, but Ren knew what it was, and he didn’t know what that meant would happen next, but he knew, and Akechi knew he knew.

Akechi quirked his lip and shook his head. “That certainly is specific. No wonder you’ve struggled.”

Electric tension hung in the air. He was used to Akechi’s interrogatory glares, but this one felt like he was being dissected, sharp like he’d been opened up and spread out for him to see what his insides crawled with. And he didn’t need to see through Akechi, just to understand the knife’s intentions, and he searched for it in his face and ached for an answer.

The bottom stair creaked as Akechi inhaled.

“Dinner’s ready!”

\--

The most awkward dinner of Ren’s life had been six years ago, on a warm autumn night that followed a long autumn day spent under the scrutiny of Inaba’s finest. He’d sat across the table with bloodshot eyes and snot on his sleeves and his jaw clenched too tightly to take a bite of his mother’s cooking, fighting between smashing the silence to pieces with what could have been either a scream or a sob. His parents said nothing as they patiently made their way through their meals, just as they’d said nothing to him in the car journey home. They were stone. Silent, hard, cold. Impossible to talk to. He’d moved the food around his plate for twenty excruciating minutes before leaving the table without a word, and only then, when he was safely up the stairs, did he hear any sound from them at all - his mother’s terrible weeping.

So, this wasn’t his most awkward dinner. It was definitely in his top five, though.

“I can’t believe you spent the whole day inside,” his mother said.

“It’s hot,” Ren replied.

Akechi hadn’t made eye contact with him once, and he was glad for it; he had no idea what his face would do, or what his parents would read into it.

“You should have at least shown Akechi around Junes.”

“Junes?” Akechi asked politely.

“It’s just a department store.”

“They have a food court. All the kids meet up there.” His mother sipped her drink, set it back down with a clink. Ren was twenty-two, by no definition a _kid,_ but he didn’t bother to correct her. Akechi looked somewhat amused by it, and he realised he’d accidentally looked at him, so he looked back to his plate and pressed his lips together.

His father spoke up. “Well, we have enjoyed having you stay with us, Akechi. It’s nice to see Ren making such well-mannered friends.”

“It’s kind of you to say so.”

“You’re always more than welcome to visit, if you’re ever in the area.”

He ran his fingers through the back of his hair and Ren looked back down at his plate because he was looking _again, idiot_. Akechi gave an artificial little laugh and said, “Of course, if Ren is good enough to invite me again.”

“Sure,” Ren mumbled, and took another bite.

“What is Ren like at university, Akechi? Is he working hard? Staying out of trouble?” His mother leaned forward in her seat slightly. “Are there any secret girlfriends he isn’t telling us about?”

“Mom.”

“Ah, he is always well behaved, as far as I can ascertain. I’m sure any girlfriends would only get in the way of his studies.” He paused, lips curling. “Besides, I hear he has specific tastes and incredibly high standards.”

Maruki’s reality would never have forced him to bear witness to his parents discussing his love life with Akechi. Maruki’s reality might have been the right choice after all.

“And how about you, Akechi?”

“I also have specific tastes and incredibly high standards.”

Ren did wish for death, actually; it didn’t seem so dramatic anymore. The kitchen’s heat had settled in his cheeks. If he stared at his plate any harder it’d crack, his mother might have said, if she wasn’t so enthralled by whatever it was Akechi changed the subject to. Hopefully nothing damning for him, though he never would have known – nothing else sunk in until his mother saved his plate from his glare and his father moved to the living room.

As he stood himself he heard his father’s voice summon him, found him holding a thick old cable in his hand.

“I found a spare,” he explained, snatching it away from Ren’s hand before he could take it. “Don’t break this one.”

So, he finally managed to set up the PlayStation, switched it on, watched the opening credits of Mortal Kombat and looked back at Akechi already sat comfortably on his bed, scrolling through his phone as if any of that previous electric tension had disappeared.

And Ren didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to return to their previous discussion, so he just said, “Ever played this?”

He shook his head, not bothering to look up.

“Want to try?”

Akechi was a quick study as always, though Ren had done the polite thing in taking the controllers with the analog stick that stuck if you pushed it left too hard too fast, and that was why he was losing so often, not because his mind was stuck on the vague, stupid thing his stupid crush had said at the dinner table. But Akechi was not a graceful winner, loved nothing more than to laugh spitefully at the vein twitching in Ren’s forehead whenever his health dropped to zero, and an hour in he’d had enough.

“Swap with me.”

Ren snatched at the controllers in Akechi’s hands, but he swiftly swept them out of the way and above his head, tutting condescendingly.

“Don’t blame the controllers for your lack of talent,” he chided with a grin so wide it split his face in two.

And Akechi was _infuriating_ to lose to, and that’s why he could justify his response: lunging and grappling with him for the controllers, taking a palm to the face and a knee to the stomach as he scrambled over him tugged at his wrist and the stubborn idiot still wouldn’t let go, so he shoved him back and straddled his waist _just_ to keep him still and for just half a second he looked down at Akechi’s parted lips

and there were hands bunched painfully tight in his t-shirt tugging him roughly to meet those lips that muffled Ren’s surprise

and there were hands molten roaming on his back pulling bodies closer together

and he was gripping soft hair hard enough to make Akechi gasp into his mouth

and for the first time in a long time Ren didn’t need to try not to think.

The headboard squeaked against the wall when Akechi bucked against his hips, and Ren stuttered out something that might have been _floor_ or _futon_ or _fuck_ that he seemed to understand; Akechi rolled from under him and dragged him off the bed with a heart stopping bang that should have given them pause but didn’t, because Akechi climbed on top of him and sunk his teeth hungrily into the flesh between his neck and shoulder and it was impossible to hear whether they’d alerted his parents above the sound of his heart thrumming in his ears anyway, why stop to try?

His t-shirt hung temptingly from his chest and Ren skirted his fingers beneath it, walked them over bone and muscle until he found the dip of his scar, ran his thumb over it and felt Akechi’s breath hitch against his skin. He sat up and yanked Ren’s t-shirt over his head, not giving him the chance to return the favour before he dipped back to grind against Ren and took his mouth to catch his groan.

And there was nothing in the world that could have prepared him for how incredible it felt to be pressed into Akechi, nothing that could have warned him how desperately he’d want more, because his hand quickly slipped between them to Akechi’s dick, Akechi’s zip without any input from his brain, and he was mouthing half formed sentences over Akechi’s lips like _can I? Is this?_ And Akechi wasn’t _responding_ , he wouldn’t stop kissing him until he forcibly pulled his head back and said, “Akechi.”

He met his eyes for just a second and said, “ _Yes_ ,” in a sharp whisper and mimicked him, nimble fingers freeing him half-way from his jeans and boxers before Ren could process it like this was a competition too, fuck, and there was no way he was going to win this one, because the hand on his dick was soft and hot and Akechi’s, and that last thought alone was enough to quickly push him over the edge. And that post-orgasm weightlessness made his usually dexterous hands fumble, but he somehow found his way into Akechi’s pants and brought him off too, and his voice cracked and he clamped his hand over his mouth and flopped down into Ren’s shoulder, the only sound their breathless panting and the distant music of their aborted game’s start-up screen.

They stayed like that. 

Akechi made a move to sit up but Ren locked his arms behind his back, because…

because he wasn’t ready to process what happened yet, and his weight felt good on top of him. And for another wonderful minute Akechi indulged him, breath warm on his bare skin, hair sleek between his fingers.

Fuck. _Fuck._

“I need to wash… this off,” Akechi mumbled as he peeled himself off of him. That was all he said before he exited the room, leaving Ren to pick up the controllers that had fallen with them and switch off the PlayStation in a daze. Bizarrely, his first coherent thought was _maybe I should text Ryuji and tell him something weird happened._ Maybe he just needed to say it out loud for it to feel real. Maybe he just needed some reassurance that it was okay and that they hadn’t just ruined everything.

Akechi was gone for longer than he needed to be, but he had no choice but to return to the room, dark and quiet and still so hot even late at night, to sit on the bed next to Ren and mull over his words the same way he was.

“That wasn’t-“

“I wanted to-“

Another silence swept over them.

Ren tried again.

“I wanted to kiss you at the inn,” he murmured – which seemed a ridiculous precaution to take, now, because if his parents had heard them over the television downstairs then a confession was the least of his worries.

“ _Why_?”

“You’re just… I can’t…” Ren swallowed, wet his lips. “There’s so much of you that I get and so much that I don’t. I think about you all the time. Being with you feels different to being with… anyone else in the world. Whatever you feel about me, I don’t want to lose that again.”

“I _killed_ you.”

Ren laughed hopelessly. “I know! I know it’s messed up. It’s still true.”

It was too dark in the room to see the expression on his face and he was glad for it. Waiting for a response was killing him more than Akechi ever had, and he didn’t need to see Akechi talk himself out of it.

A hand cupped his jaw and pulled him in. Akechi kissed him again, hesitant, brief, gentle, then let his face drop into the crevice between his neck and shoulder. And he stayed there. Soft breath on his sticky skin.

“Not going to say anything back?” Ren prompted.

Akechi swallowed.

“You’re disgusting. Hurry up and wash.”

He stood in front of the bathroom mirror.

Shallow indents, a raw, blotchy red, marked the shape of Akechi’s teeth a fraction too high on his neck for him to suitably cover in the middle of a heatwave. Probably passable as a bruise, at least to his parents if they looked at him long enough to notice, less likely a plausible excuse for Morgana and Ryuji who’d certainly recognise it the moment he stepped through their front door. His lips were darkened, kiss stained, smiling at his reflection. He held onto the edge of the sink and stared into the drain. Ran his tongue over them. 

Ren liked Akechi. Ren _really_ liked Akechi. And he probably had done from the start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :3


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW:  
> \- complicated family relationships  
> \- briefly implied homophobia  
> \- family argument  
> \- suggestive content

Who would make it to the washing machine first? Ren, or his mother?

In her favour was the fact that she had full authority over that domain and it was already eight in the morning, so she had most definitely already been awake for two hours or more with full access. Supporting him was the fact it was Friday and she usually left the washing until after his father came home from work, and that he had a very serious mission, and that mission was not to out himself to his parents through dirty bedsheets.

Akechi had been ‘asleep’ on the futon by the time he’d returned to the bedroom. Ren didn’t mind. He still needed time to think about how the suddenly real possibility of them being a couple would work when neither of them were any good at verbalising their own feelings and the vast majority of their relationship had been rooted in trickery and petty competition. For example, was he supposed to continue on as if nothing had happened, or was he meant to say something about last night when he nudged Akechi awake to take the sheets? Rolling to his feet without any of his usual elegance, Akechi stood in the minimal free space of his room and watched Ren pull apart the beds vacantly.

“If you’re that determined to hide the evidence, you might want to put on a shirt,” Akechi said. Ren touched the place he knew must have settled into a mottled bruise on his neck and wrestled his dumb grin into something akin to a scowl.

“Everyone will see it at Narukami’s tomorrow. Hope you didn’t want to keep this a secret.”

“No,” Akechi said lightly. “I think it will be quite funny to see how your friends react to their noble leader sleeping with his betrayer. Do they have any idea how deviant your tastes are?”

He thought of Makoto’s well-meaning but often bewildering talks about missing Akechi and said, “Probably.”

He did put on a t-shirt, though, to cover the worst of the bite before hoisting the bundle of cloth into his arms. With any luck his mother would be out in the garden and wouldn’t catch him to question his sudden clean streak or what had brightened his mood so thoroughly, because he could feel the spring in his step as he made his way down the stairs, a lightness that he’d been missing all week. Through the kitchen window he could see her on her knees in the dirt watering their patch of flowers. Clueless to her son’s joy. A wild thought of telling her passed him by, of just calling out to say, _Good morning, mom! I think I might have a boyfriend now, sort of. Don’t worry, you really like him._ He honestly had no idea how she’d react to that, though he suspected it would be with a quick subject change and a subsequent lapse of memory regarding anything to do with his sexuality.

Awkward conversations were not his family’s strong suit.

“Ren, you don’t have to do that.”

Her voice startled him out of his thoughts, and he finished loading his washing quickly, turned on the machine before turning to face her. “I thought I’d help,” he said.

She tutted and opened and checked the fabric softener compartment like the last three years away from home hadn’t taught him how to wash his clothes properly. Then, to his surprise, she smiled and reached up to hold his cheek.

“Look at you. All grown up,” she said. “Your father and I have been so pleased to see you finally turning your life around.”

His mother had such a talent for that, an ability to sharpen words that should have been soft to pop any bubble of happiness. Ren had never needed to _turn his life around,_ but he held on to the strings of his good mood and tried to laugh it off, turned his head away from her warm hand.

“Have you thought about whether you’re going to move back here next year? It’s so empty without you around the house.”

“Depends where I can get a job,” he lied – there was no chance on earth he was going to be looking anywhere but Tokyo.

“We never see you anymore. We miss you.”

“I know.”

“Come back alone next time, okay? So we can catch up and talk properly.”

“Mom-“

It would have been easy to go back upstairs and pretend the conversation hadn’t happened, but she was right - they were never alone like this anymore, not even when he’d come back for his final year of high school, preferring to spend all his days and nights shut up in his room sulking and missing Tokyo. She looked very small stood so close to him, dainty and fragile and aging. Puzzled, waiting for the end of his sentence.

How could he expect her to know why he was staying away if he never told her?

“Why didn’t you stand up for me when they took me to court?”

The sweetness in her face soured fast.

“Where did that come from?”

“You should have trusted me.”

“I’m not having this argument with you again, Ren.”

“You never apologised.”

“I don’t want to keep talking about this. It’s in the past, we’re all trying to move on.”

“It’s hard to be here when you still treat me like I’m on probation.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she snapped. “I only ever want to make sure you stay on the right path.”

“I always was!”

The washing machine was whirring. Spinning and rattling against the counter it had been trapped beneath. Ren took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry that me getting arrested caused you so much trouble, but you need to apologise too, or I don’t know if I can keep coming back here.”

With a dismissive shake of her head she stormed back into the garden without a backwards glance, returned to her flowers and just knelt there in the grass, unmoving, back towards him.

Maybe with his good luck the night before he’d let himself hope he’d succeed here, too. It didn’t matter. He’d developed a numbness to it. When, despite what he’d told her, he unflinchingly returned for Christmas she’d act as if he’d never mentioned it and ask him once again why he never came home, and maybe then he’d placate her by saying he was too busy working to visit instead.

Sheets stripped and futon rolled back up in his closet, his bedroom looked bare. Empty of anything that said anything about the past six years of his life. A cramped little time capsule with cracked blue paint and an ancient carpet and a suitcase full of clothes he’d never bothered to unpack.

His hometown and everything in it was an old wound that had healed over, for the most part: it was the memory of the original pain more than the occasional persisting soreness. 

Akechi looked at him over his phone. “What’s wrong with you?”

Or, maybe he wasn’t as unaffected by his parents’ lack of empathy as he thought.

“Mom,” he said simply.

“You didn’t tell her-“

He had to laugh. “I asked her to apologise for the Shido thing. Big mistake.”

“I see.”

Just two more hours until their train back to Tokyo. Two hours until he was back at his place with Ryuji and Morgana. Ren joined Akechi on the mattress too small for them to both to lie comfortably side by side, so he placed himself half on top of him, dropping his forehead into his chest with a dull thump.

“Is this okay?” Ren asked - an afterthought.

“Surely by now you can trust that I will never miss an opportunity to inform you when you’re irritating me. Stop asking.”

Ren snorted into his t-shirt, relaxing a little more. Smelling the faint notes of herbal bodywash he must have been stealing from the bathroom. Hearing his thumb tap against his phone’s screen. He liked the reassurance that Akechi was into him enough to allow it. And maybe he was a little sad and needed the comfort of someone’s soft heartbeat against him.

“It’s the hottest summer on record,” Akechi commented when neither of them had spoken for a while. “Forty degrees in some areas. On average, the global temperature increases by around 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade, but this year alone has seen a steady increase to almost 0.5 degrees since spring in Japan. Another power station in Kyoto is being forced to give a press conference on their carbon emissions tonight.”

“Too hot.”

“How enlightening. Thank you for your valuable input.”

He pushed himself up onto his hands and knees and kissed him again, because he didn’t really feel like talking about the horrors of global warming, and he had a good feeling that Akechi was only making conversation to distract him anyway.

He quickly learned two things about kissing Akechi: one, that he had an obvious aversion to Ren being on top of him, and two, that he was incapable of playing nice.

Fingers tangled deep in the roots of his hair made what he’d meant to be an innocent make-out session more heated than he’d intended, and when Ren made a vain attempt to shove him off and onto his back, he found his wrists pushed into the mattress, looked up to see Akechi, wild eyed and breathless, more like a hungry dog than the weather reporter he’d been five minutes ago. They still had an hour left until they needed to catch their bus.

Honestly, he’d had worse trips home.

\--

Weatherman Akechi should have saved his forecast for the journey back to Tokyo, because all Ren could think was _hot, hot, hot_ from the moment he felt the scorching rays through the train window, though he was relatively sure that even he couldn’t muster the energy to info dump under such uncomfortable conditions. It was the type of hot that let him smell the metal they were slowly cooking within. The kind of hot that rendered talking laborious and made each connection stood uselessly in a strange, quiet town a welcome break.

Each minute of the terrible journey was taking him further and further away from the biggest source of stress in his life, it was also taking him away from a place where he could spend time wandering aimlessly with Akechi down quiet, empty streets, drawing snippets of truths from each other. Pulling his bag over his shoulder, he stopped and looked at Akechi at the ticket gate where they’d part for the first time in a week and honestly did feel a little sad about it.

“Did you and Narukami agree on a time for tomorrow?” he asked.

“Six,” Ren confirmed. “We can meet beforehand.”

“There’s no need. You’ll be travelling with Sakamoto and Morgana, I presume.”

“We can meet you on the way?”

“I am perfectly capable of making my own way to Ogikubo. Besides, it’s out of your way, and I am positive you can cope twenty-four hours without my presence.”

Caught red handed. His lower lip protruded before he could think to stop it, and Akechi scoffed a laugh and shook his head in disbelief. Still disbelief. A large crowd passed through the barriers in front of them, and Akechi checked the time on his phone.

“See you tomorrow. Don’t be late.”

“See you,” he said, and then waited and watched him leave, like the sentimental fool Akechi had always accused him of being – but before he disappeared down the escalator Akechi looked back at him over his shoulder, so really, he couldn’t say shit.

When he finally walked out of the heat and in through his front door, he found himself lifted off his feet, spun around hiked over a broad, naked shoulder like he weighed nothing at all, pushing all the breath out of him.

“Ryuji, it’s hot,” he whined.

“Man, it’s been so boring without you here. I hate when you go visit your ‘rents.”

“Hey! Put him down.”

He saw Morgana weaving between Ryuji’s legs, his tail flicking playfully. Ryuji obliged, kept his hands gripping his arms and beamed at him like the ball of sunshine he was. Far more comforting than the one outside. Morgana headbutted his ankle until Ren scooped him up into his arms and let him sit on his shoulder, a familiar weight he’d missed terribly in Inaba.

Surprisingly, the apartment seemed intact - suspiciously clean, even, like Ryuji had spent the last few hours running around destroying evidence. Rooming with two of his best friends had been amongst the better decisions in his life, but Ryuji did need some guided support when it came to keeping the place habitable. He threw himself down face first on the sofa free of empty potato chip packets and cans and sighed deeply and dramatically.

“That bad, huh?”

“I told mom to apologise to me before we left,” he spoke into the cushion.

“Ouch.”

“Yup.”

Morgana climbed onto his back, tiny claws needling through the thin material of his t-shirt, purring quietly despite what he was sure were his best efforts to keep the sound at bay.

“Tell us what the other persona users were like!” Morgana demanded.

He shared an abridged version of the events one half of the Investigation Team had told them, certain that they’d be hearing it again tomorrow through several new lenses. Just as he’d been at the café, Ryuji and Morgana hung onto every word with unabashed glee.

“That’s so cool,” Ryuji said. “I can’t believe they got to climb into TVs.”

“Uh, what’s so cool about that? Our stuff was way cooler _and_ we didn’t have to deal with ‘fighting our true selves’.”

“Yeah, true, that part sounds totally lame woah what the _hell_ is that on your neck?” and Ryuji tugged at the collar of his shirt from behind because all sense of personal space was lost between them, briefly cutting off his air supply and making him bat blindly behind him for freedom. “What the hell, dude? How’d you get laid in Inaba? Oh, man, was it one of the persona users? Were they cute?” Maybe he should stop fighting it and just let Ryuji kill him. “Wait, how’d you manage that with Akechi at your place?”

“Uh, Ryuji…”

Unfortunately, Ryuji did not kill him. He felt the pressure release and sunk further into the cushions, not wanting to see the looks on his friends’ faces.

“Really? _Akechi_?”

“He’s pretty?” Ren said.

“Aw, come on.”

When he came to terms with the fact that he couldn’t just never see his friends’ faces again he forced himself to sit up, placed his hand over the offending mark and tried to look as sheepish as he could for sympathy points. Ryuji was speechless; Morgana seemed less surprised. More concerned. Looking up at him with his big blue eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Ren nodded. “Yeah. We’re good.”

Apparently that required more explanation, because Ryuji was staring open mouthed at him and Morgana was tilting his little head.

“It… look, I didn’t expect it to happen.”

“Are you two dating now, or what?” Morgana asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, honestly.

“Do you like him?” Ryuji asked.

“… Yeah.”

Exhaling loudly, Ryuji crashed onto the sofa beside him. Shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe I’m gonna have to be nice to Akechi.”

“You don’t have to hang out with him,” Ren quickly assured him.

“Nah. You’re my best bro, obviously I’m gonna. If you want to bring him round here and stuff, it’s fine.”

Not for the first time, Ren was momentarily overcome by how much he loved them. Chie had been right about that, too: they were friends for life, through thick and thin, for better or worse, and questionable taste in former hitman partners.

“Is he at least nicer now?” Ryuji asked.

Ren paused. Thought about it.

“Kind of. He’s still Akechi, but it feels like he’s trying.”

Ryuji hummed and nodded, understanding. Then he said: “Hey, I’m starving. You wanna order takeout?”

\--

A blue-tac stained wall greeted him when he entered his bedroom, coated with mementos from his friends. Ann’s first cover shoot and a gymnastics poster from the event where Sumire had been awarded her first gold medal. A print of one of Yusuke’s most beautiful renowned art pieces and a group photo of them at Makoto’s graduation. Another photo of him and Ryuji after the latter had won second place in a charity race. Him and Haru at her fourth coffee shop opening. An article praising Futaba’s latest security app. A series of silly snaps of Morgana that he absolutely hated but that never failed to bring a smile to Ren’s face. In the top draw of the cabinet beneath it, a single black leather glove.

His bed faced it. It made him feel at home.

Distantly, he wondered what his parents were doing. Were they sitting in front of the television, talking about him? Had they argued about him already? Were they pretending nothing had happened? He looked down at his phone to find, unsurprisingly, that neither had text to see if he’d made it back alright. Normally they did that. So, he supposed they were giving him the silent treatment.

He shrugged it off. They’d forget about it soon enough.

Morgana hopped up onto the bed and talked about his week with Futaba while Ren thumbed through his messages and saw Akechi’s name and wondered what he was doing instead. Probably making a list of questions to ask Yu at his house tomorrow, or maybe clenching his teeth through a shift at Jazz Jin. As comforting as his bedroom was, it felt big and empty without him; after a week together, he’d grown used to hearing his restless movements against his sheets.

He kept his phone in his hand as he climbed atop of the sheets, still far too hot to be beneath them, and he looked at Akechi’s name and tried to think up a good reason to send him a message. Something simple he could pass off as a joke if Akechi was weird about it.

 **Ren:  
** Miss you already.

The read notification turned blue immediately, and Ren laughed out loud. Caught him. The typing bar flickered and stopped and continued for a full two minutes before Akechi sent a message back.

 **Akechi:  
** I look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

“Jeez, is that Akechi being nice?” Morgana asked, needling his way over his shoulder.

Ren lifted him beneath his armpits and placed him onto his lap, trying to scowl.

“Don’t read my messages.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Awww I hope they stay cute and dumb and happy that would be really nice. :) Thank you as always for the lovely comments and kudos! You all keep me writing! <3


	10. Chapter 10

Yu Narukami lived in a second-floor apartment on a narrow street a few minutes’ walk from Ogikubo Station, a peaceful little neighbourhood eerily empty for so early on in the evening - though to anyone watching them from their windows they definitely looked like the strange ones, voluntarily stepping out into the oven Tokyo had so rapidly become. It was for a good cause. With any luck they’d be one step closer to solving the mystery that was Akechi’s continued existence.

Besides that, since that dinner with Chie, Yukiko, and Kanji, Ren had remembered a good deal more story to tell, and he was very much looking forward to telling it.

Ryuji pounded his fist into the door exactly once before it swung open and Ann threw her arms tightly around his middle, beaming like a madwoman, rushing them to take off their shoes. “Come on and get out the sun! You’re going to _love_ them.”

Inside Yusuke sat neatly at the dining room table, locked in conversation with a face that Ren was surprised to recognise immediately.

“ _Naoto Shirogane_ has a persona!” Ann exclaimed excitedly, gesturing to her like she might otherwise be unnoticed. Naoto shifted slightly in her seat and offered them a hesitant wave. “How crazy is that? Akechi’s going to freak out, right?”

Before he could answer, she pointed out the two other strangers at the table in turn. “This is Yosuke Hanamura, and their leader, Yu Narukami, and this is Ryuji Sakamoto and our leader, Ren Amamiya. Oh, and Morgana. He can talk.”

Morgana peaked out from Ren’s bag and without a single word to either of the new human guests Yu crossed the room and crouched down in front of him, eye to eye with him.

“Uh…”

“Speak,” Yu commanded.

“I’m not a dog!”

“Meow?”

“Ugh, tell them they won’t be able to understand me ‘cause they never saw me talking in the metaverse.”

Ren did. Yu nodded somewhat sadly and comforted himself with scratching behind Morgana’s ears, which he leaned into for just a second before realising the indignity of it and sprinted to the table to sit between Yusuke’s legs. Then Yu stood up tall, a few inches taller than Ren, even, and offered him his hand to shake.

“It’s good to meet another wildcard,” he said.

“Likewise,” Ren agreed, taking it.

The others filtered in quickly after, and their arrivals and subsequent introductions gave Ren a chance to subtly investigate the room. It was spacious, not an expensive looking place but certainly not cheap judging by the size of the TV on the wall. Nice, but average. Despite his heart-to-heart with Chie, he couldn’t help but be a little disappointed by the normalcy of their leader’s post-persona life. He’d kind of been hoping for a little hidden magic. Beneath the TV stood a framed photograph of their team, ten years younger, stood outside Yasoinaba Station in their school uniforms grinning wildly at the camera. And yeah, there it was: the evidence of something special.

Last to arrive was Akechi, Sumire, and a woman wearing almost comically large, round sunglasses stood between them.

“I bumped into them both and realised we were heading the same way,” Sumire explained as she gave Ren a tight hug. “You know Rise Kujikawa, right? She was a guest on my dad’s show last winter.”

“Wow, there’s so many of you! Hi, nice to meet you all!”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at a signing?” Yosuke asked, brow cocked.

“And miss this? I don’t think so.”

Akechi cast an almost imperceptive glance Ren’s way that he might have missed had he not been watching him like a hawk since he’d walked through the door, cut short because he immediately looked away the moment Ren smirked back, like he’d been caught doing something shameful. He wasn’t the one who had to worry, though; what was truly shameful was how easily one fleeting look had filled Ren full of butterflies.

Maybe Ryuji had noticed it too, because he sped across the room through more excited introductions and threw his arm around Akechi’s shoulder like he was greeting an old friend. “Back on your feet again, huh? Good to have you back, buddy.”

That startled about half the room into silence and made Akechi look at him again. This time it accused, _really? You told him already?_

Ren gave an innocent shrug.

Unfortunately for Akechi, it seemed to open the floodgates.

“Yeah, totally!” Ann said, rushing over too. “We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Indeed, it seems you’re quite resilient.”

“You look well.”

“You’re running low on lives, Akechi. Better be careful!”

“We were so glad to hear you survived.”

A small crowd of his friends had circled around Akechi stood tense and awkward at the centre of genuine positive attention, and Ren had no idea if it would help or hinder, but he appreciated them all nonetheless.

Word had clearly been sent to Yu and the others already because none of them seemed confused by the display: they watched from the outside fondly, leaving them to reconcile.

Akechi looked to the door like he might try and make an escape. He sighed and found his words instead.

“Yes, well. I’d appreciate finding out why I’ve been brought back, so can we hurry up and get to the reason why we’re all here?”

Ryuji flashed painfully obvious finger guns Ren’s way and followed the others to gather around the table.

There wasn’t quite enough room, so Ren leant against the back of the armchair and smiled again when Akechi came to stand beside him. Yu perched behind them on the island counter, looked them over with the same blank expression he’d worn since they’d arrived and folded his arms.

“I don’t know how to get into the Velvet Room.”

“Well, this was a waste of time,” Akechi said. He took half a step toward the door before Ren closed his hand around his wrist and pulled him back.

“Do you have any ideas?” Ren asked, not letting go under Akechi’s cold, warning glare.

“We have been discussing possibilities,” Naoto said. “Though to begin with, we thought it would be wise to share what we know about the Velvet Room, including relevant information about both Igor and Margret.”

“Who’s Margret?”

“The Velvet Room attendant. Was she absent for you?”

Apparently, there were numerous differences between Ren and Yu’s Velvet Room experiences, which he should really have expected considering his Igor turned out to be a malevolent God in disguise, but still came as a surprise. Different attendants, for one. Explaining that his own manifestation of the room had taken the form of a prison felt unfairly revealing compared to Yu’s limousine complete with drinks and neon lights. There were similarities, too, though: mysterious doors in seemingly random locations, an emphasis on forming bonds, communication through dreams… 

“Dreams?” Akechi prompted.

After so much discussion regarding a subject only two of them really knew anything about, the rest of the guests had tuned them out to share stories amongst themselves. Only Akechi and Naoto were paying apt attention, similarly focused on the mystery before them.

“Sometimes Igor – Yaldabaoth – called me into the Velvet Room while I slept.”

“Same.”

“Has that occurred since you completed your… respective missions?”

Ren shook his head slowly, and saw Yu do the same.

“Lavenza hasn’t. Usually if she wants to meet she just shows up in my room.”

“Same.”

It was satisfying to know that he wasn’t the only wildcard who hadn’t had a clue what he was doing.

“I think I go there without being invited sometimes,” Yu added after a moment’s thought. “I’ve been having weird dreams again lately.”

“Explain,” Akechi said.

Yu wrinkled his nose and looked up at the ceiling. “Nothing happens. It just feels the same. Prickly.”

“Prickly?”

“Prickly. Like when you’re cold.”

“Ah.” The conversations died down when Ren exclaimed a little too loudly. “Me too.”

Those brief snippets of dreams he hardly remembered, dreams of something cold and blue and luxurious: it was almost exactly how he’d felt in the Velvet Room, like he was somewhere he didn’t belong – a different world.

Akechi looked like he might murder him. “You’re just telling me this now?”

“I didn’t realise until now. All I remembered waking up was being somewhere cold and blue.”

“Wait…” Akechi covered his face with his hand and sighed hard. “While we were in Inaba. Me too.”

“I’ve never dreamt that.” Naoto cocked an eyebrow.

“Akechi is a wildcard.”

Yosuke leaned in, suddenly interested. “ _Two_ wildcards? Man, you guys must have had it easy, huh?”

“No,” Akechi spoke, just as Ren said, “It’s complicated.”

“The Velvet Room sits between your conscious and your subconscious. It makes sense that you wildcards would revisit it in your dreams without even meaning to, but unless you’re invited or can find a way to control those dreams, I don’t know if you’re going to be able to use that to speak to Igor or the attendants even with your key.” Morgana spoke; Ren translated.

“We might be thinking about this too logically,” Naoto said. “The Velvet Room doesn’t adhere to our world’s rules. To put it plainly, it’s magic.”

“There has to be a logic to magic, too,” Akechi replied.

That wasn’t something Ren thought he could help with. The two former child prodigies sat opposite each other at the table as the rest of the group began to move away (now thoroughly lost in the conversation), and Morgana joined them too, offering insights where he could. Ren tried his best, but it quickly became apparent that despite being one of the only two people in the room to have spent any significant amount of time in the Velvet Room, he really didn’t have the first clue about it. Honestly, that year had been so strange he hadn’t even thought to question it.

When he saw that Akechi was happy enough speaking to Naoto alone and wouldn’t miss him, Ren let himself wander around the room. Yosuke and Ryuji had moved onto comparing battle stories at the other end of the table. Ann, Sumire, Rise, and Yusuke had commandeered the sofa, and he could see Makoto with Futaba and Haru in the kitchen speaking in hushed voices. He tried not to let that worry him.

“How did you find us?”

Ren nearly flinched to see Yu suddenly stood beside him.

“Akechi thought that rumours and urban legends, sudden deaths, and unexplained phenomenon like the fog linked back to the Velvet Room. He found out I was from Inaba, so that’s the one we went with.”

“You going to investigate the others?”

“Yep,” Ren said. Even if Akechi wasn’t. “Talking about it’s been good.”

“It’s fun to relive the glory days,” Yu agreed.

“Do you miss it too?”

“It’s hard not to. I used to fight gods with gods and now I’m a producer at a news station. Got a hell of a lot of stories out of it, though.”

“Yeah.”

“Yu, come tell this guy about the god at the gas station,” Yosuke shouted from the table.

Yu snorted. “If you find any others, call us,” he said before leaving to join them.

Arms snaked around his waist and squeezed hard, almost hard enough to make him gasp, and a blonde head of hair wormed its way onto his shoulder. “So…” Ann spoke quietly into his ear as she swayed him side to side. “A little birdy told me something super interesting last night.”

He shouldn’t have been surprised. There were few secrets between the Phantom Thieves.

“You know, I always kind of thought… with the secret meetings and that glove in your draw.”

Okay, there were no secrets between the Phantom Thieves.

“So? Is it official? Who confessed to who?”

He looked over to the table, where Akechi, Morgana, and Naoto remained locked in their discussion. “I don’t know. It just happened.”

“The disgraced detective and his arch-rival, the leader of the Phantom Thieves. It’s cute - romantic. I want to know all the details later, okay? But come talk to Rise! She’s great, we both had shoots in the same magazine last year. It’s so weird how close we’ve all been to each other this whole time. She was just telling us about this beauty competition they had at Yasogami High…”

So, he went to sit with the girls and Yusuke. Rise was a delight, as expected – sweet and bubbly, but a little more mature than she seemed on television. Ann was quick to tell her about the poster he’d once had of her in his room and she seemed genuinely ecstatic, swore she’d visit one day and sign it if he still had it lying around somewhere. He watched Yosuke and Ryuji join Makoto, Haru, and Futaba and smiled to see them all laughing at whatever story they were being told, and in that moment he felt confident in his new resolve to find as many persona users as he could, because that week had been the best he’d felt since they’d defeated Yaldabaoth.

Of course, there were a few reasons for that. One of them caught his eye and gestured his head towards the corridor. Ren excused himself and tried to follow in a cool, chill way that didn’t betray his eagerness to be alone with him.

Akechi wasn’t waiting in the corridor. A hand bunched in his shirt and yanked him in through a door that swiftly shut behind him, and before he could even tell which room they were in his vision was obscured by Akechi crashing their lips together. He stumbled from the surprise of it but Akechi steadied him, pulling him back with him until he felt him hit something solid and heard a heavy bottle hit the floor.

Ren hesitated, looked down. Fabric softener. Outside Futaba cackled; the murmur of conversation continued undisturbed, and Ren laughed quietly.

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

It was a laundry room, or something like that, five feet by five feet at a stretch, and Akechi was smirking at him from where he half-sat on the washing machine in a way that made him really, really wish all his friends weren’t waiting outside. Better for talking through things with Naoto, evidently. Ren let his arms loop around his back, settled between his legs and peered at him curiously.

“So, what are your thoughts?” Akechi asked.

Ren pressed his face into Akechi’s neck. “You’re very hot.”

“Yes. However, I was talking about the Velvet Room.”

He knew that. He pulled back and ran his hands down Akechi’s sides, holding him at the waist. “What did Shirogane say?”

“It might be the case that now that we are aware of the dreams, we will be able control them better, and if not, there are methods of teaching yourself how to lucid dream that might have some success. However, that is a mere possibility that would take a significant amount of time to perfect that I am, quite frankly, not willing to waste.”

He really liked the way Akechi’s mouth moved when he spoke, the way he enunciated every word so clearly.

“Another more actionable course would be to meet with someone who has more experience in matters of magic - and while I realise how utterly ridiculous that sounds, Shirogane made the interesting point that while tools of divination might be useless in the hands of those who claim to have a connection to some higher power to make money off of unsuspecting fools, we actually _are_ connected to a higher power.”

“I know a fortune teller in Shinjuku,” Ren said. “She’s good. She knows we’re the Phantom Thieves, too.”

“Is that truly how you spent your free time back then?”

“Wait until you hear about all the time I spent in Kichijoji with the pretty detective.”

Akechi snorted and caught Ren by the throat before he could enact his plan of revenge for the bite that had outed them to his friends like he could sense the intent, holding him back like a bad dog with an expression to match.

“Stay on topic,” he said, as if Ren had been the one to drag him into the laundry room to make out. “I want you to introduce us, tonight. If the distance is too much you can stay at my apartment.”

“Are you trying to get me back to your place?”

“I can retract the invitation.”

The distance between his place and Shinjuku and Akechi’s place and Shinjuku were probably equally matched, but who was he to deny such an offer?

“I’ll do that,” he agreed. “Later, though. I want to hear more stories.”

Akechi gave a hum that seemed to indicate his reluctant acceptance of those terms, so Ren pushed forwards to kiss him again. Nobody would question it if they were gone for a few more minutes, and now that he could openly admit how much he wanted Akechi it was hard to resist the opportunity to have his hands on him. And he’d kissed a good number of people before, but none of them kissed like him, like it was another thing he had to win. His slender fingers stayed at his neck possessively, and honestly, if Akechi wanted to be in charge that was fine by him – he’d spent far too long playing leader to fight for it.

The last remaining thought in his head told him that if today said anything about what normal life was going to be, then it really would be alright after all.

The door clicked open. He heard a sigh.

“Am I interrupting something?” Makoto asked.

Akechi looked impassively over Ren’s shoulder. “What gave it away?”

“Ren, may I speak with you for a moment?”

Akechi slipped past them both through the narrow doorway and Makoto closed the door behind him. For someone who barely reached his chin she could be quite intimidating. She looked at him for a long moment and folded her arms.

“Did you know?” Ren asked her.

“Haru told me.”

“Wait, who told Haru?”

“Morgana.”

Yeah. No secrets between Phantom Thieves.

He thought back to their gathering in the kitchen and asked what he’d been fighting not to think about. “Are Haru and Futaba okay?”

“You should speak to them yourself.” Then she softened a little. “They’re okay. Ren, we were all there when Shido confessed to how he’d manipulated Akechi, and we all saw what it did to him. Since that fight, he has only helped us, even at the cost of his own life. I’ll never understand him, and he will never be able to make up for all the hurt he’s caused, but this isn’t a black and white matter. Everyone understands that. You should still talk to them, though.”

“I will,” Ren promised, because he had always been planning to - just not until things felt a little less like a fast-moving dream.

“Are _you_ okay?”

“Yeah.”

Makoto’s eyebrow twitched, waiting for more.

“Being at home sucked, but having Akechi there helped. I think he wants to be better.”

“I hope he can be. If he hurts you, you realise I’m going to destroy him, right?”

“I know.”

She looked him up and down carefully, like a mother appraising her problem child but with far more amusement than his actual mother had ever had with him. “You should fix your hair before you-“

“Oh my God!”

“Holy shit! What the eff is that!?”

It had been five years, but Ren was sharp as ever at the first sign of trouble: he shoved open the door and sprinted all ten feet down the corridor only to see something that made him skid and stumble to a sudden stop.

The television had distorted, it’s screen static with a spiralling pattern like ripples in water that could only have been caused by the boy climbing out of it, which might have been like something out of a horror movie had he not looked like a fourteen year old figure skater. 

He fell from the screen without any grace in a pile of limbs on the floor in front of Ryuji and Yosuke, the latter of which looked far less concerned by the situation, more entertained than anything. The screen returned to a smooth, impenetrable black. Ren snapped his jaw closed.

The boy sprang to his feet with a surprising amount of energy and held out his arms wide, grinning a toothy grin around the room.

“I have arrived!”

“Dude, you’re so late,” Yosuke said.

“You know time is weird over there!”

Makoto stepped from behind him. “By over there, you mean…?”

“The Midnight Channel, obviously.”

His brain lagged as he tried to make sense of what they’d all just seen, because the boy had definitely fallen from the television and he knew that was how the Investigation Team had entered the metaverse, but Mementos had been erased and they weren’t supposed to be able to get into the other world any more.

“How is that possible?” Akechi asked before he could.

“This seems to have come as a surprise to you,” Naoto said. “Are you no longer able to access The Midnight Channel yourselves?”

“It was sealed off,” Ren said, at the same time as Akechi said, “Take us inside.”

“Please,” Ann finished.

It was like climbing through jelly. In the chain of persona users he’d come second, one hand clasped tightly around Yu’s as he stepped through and pulled him inside after him. And then it was like falling – it _was_ falling – an uncomfortably long descent that made his stomach lurch until he hit soft, solid ground.

And he was lying in a field of lush grass and wildflowers, listening to water trickling somewhere nearby. Above him was a vast, empty sky bright blue and cloudless, the sun bearing down on him mild and inexplicably familiar. He could have put it down to the sensation of being in another world, but something told him that wasn’t it. The peace, the quiet. It was something else. Something ancient.

Shadows plummeted from the sky, and he rolled out of the way just in time to avoid a long chain of friends crashing into him. One by one, they rose to their feet and took in their ethereal surroundings with the same unrestrained awe he was certain he’d had. And it hit him, what it reminded him of.

Maruki’s paradise.

“This is amazing,” Ann gawped.

“It’s so cool!”

Morgana bounced to his two feet and stared down at his hands, flexing his fingers, in a form Ren hadn’t seen in five years.

“He talked,” Yu said, and for the first time since they’d met him, he broke into a grin.

Akechi dusted himself off and looked silently into the sky. Then, with a voice that cracked around the edges, he yelled out one word. “Hereward!”

And he answered his call. Before them stood a dark knight, tall and powerful with a splatter of red across his broad chest like blood. Akechi stared at him and laughed, that violent laugh that sloped too far into madness to be comfortable to hear, but it resonated with something else, too. A relief. A gladness.

Fourteen more voices called out for their persona, and fourteen persona heeded them in return. They compared them, admired them, demonstrated their moves. He and Yu burned through their endless supply like children eagerly comparing collectables and then that was the rest of their night, of course it was, showing off in friendly duels that stretched muscles Ren had forgotten he even had. A rush he never thought he’d feel again.

Only Akechi sat back, and he understood why. In their own fight five falls ago he’d felt his restraint creek under the pressure of a true power he couldn’t prove, a power not even Ren believed he could beat. Better to keep himself out of a situation where he’d have to resist the temptation. But he could feel his eyes trained on him as he fought, and knew they were thinking the exact same thing – that this would be where they had their rematch. The decider.

Ren couldn’t wait.

He didn’t know how much time they’d spent there. The sky stayed blue with perpetual sunshine even though it felt like hours had passed. When they’d had enough, when they were tired and the good kind of aching, the blonde boy – Teddie, apparently a friendly former shadow given a human body, which he was sure Morgana would be complaining about for months to come – conjured a stack of old, bulky television sets out of thin air. Their exit.

“Can we come back here?” he asked when it was just him and Teddie left.

“Now that you’ve seen this place, you should be able to travel through any TV whenever you want just like the rest of us. Only I can let you out though! So, if you ever feel like visiting, make sure to let me know - otherwise, I can’t promise you won’t get stuck in here forever!”

It was almost eleven when they returned to reality and still, a wall of heat hit him hard the moment he emerged from the screen. He wished they could just stay in that world until the incessant heatwave was over - just him and his friends all by themselves, messing around in endless fields like the ones he’d once been so accustomed to. Not forever, of course. There was still too much wrong with the world to leave it forever, too much he still hopelessly thought he might be able to fix one day. But it was tempting. Especially after a night like that.

“Oh, man, we’re cutting it close,” Ann said as she shoved on her shoes in the doorway, rushing while the rest of them said their thanks and goodbyes. “Yusuke, come on!”

Yusuke bowed his head to Yu and Teddie. “Thank you for welcoming us into your homes.”

“Come ooon!”

“You can stay at ours,” Ren said. Ann and Yusuke would need to change lines, unlike him and Ryuji. “Me and Akechi have a lead to follow, so you can have my room.”

Akechi cocked an eyebrow but kept his mouth shut; there was no way they’d have time to get to Shinjuku and back tonight, but... he’d already accepted the invitation, and he had no intention of going back on it now. 

“ _Following a lead._ Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” Futaba elbowed Ren’s arm as she passed him on the stairs, snickering quietly.

Ryuji patted him on the shoulder hard, waggling his eyebrows. “Have fun, dude.”

Never mind. His friends were the worst. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really, really hate writing big group scenes, so excuse how fast paced this all is lmao.
> 
> Anyway! Sorry for the slightly longer wait with this one! That's probably going to be more common, but hey, only three chapters left to go! Thank you for all the comments and kudos, they are extremely appreciated <3


End file.
